Winter is on its way. The monsoon has arrived. Grey skies, cool air, and nanner slugs abound.

I will miss the dry crisp of fall. But I am ready for a few months of damp rain and wind.

This wild water is the reason I love Cascadia so much, after all. This depression-inducing, misty, fungal, rot-making damp. The seep and drip, the blow, the hail and the flooded streets. The people with umbrellas who look so out of place-because really to get by mentally in a constant deluge you have to learn to coexist with the weather, not shield from it.

Glad I have a rainshield on my tent, even though the wipers on my car are awful (volvos!) and that my new raincoat is truly proof against wet neck and chest. But the rain on my face, hands, and hair will always be welcome to me-when I first came to Seattle it was the rainy season, the depth of it. Within a few weeks I’d fallen in love with the clouds and I have never really fallen out. Oregon has the same charm, anyplace within this rainshadow affects me in a bittersweet nostalgic way. I adore it.

Every year I watch people from sunny places come and go.

People move here and see the glory of the northwest but I think many are not prepared, really, for the reality of how much water from the sky it actually takes to keep everything so green.

So many move here and leave a few years later.

I know a few who have stuck it out for decades. I am one of them.

I know a few, too, who have found ways around the madness of months spent indoors, of lack of vitamin D, of SADD and all the other complaints.

I know a lot of people who have mold allergies and simply have to move away to some sunnier climate.

I don’t blame them or think they’re weak- everyone has a climate they are most well-built for, this just happens to be mine.