It Can't Rain All the Time

The rain has stopped now. Or slowed. It comes and goes and "stop" has a sense of finality that the weather at 9000 feet rejects. Besides, once the rain stops outside, it continues in here. Little droplets pit and pat about the room as moisture condenses on the cold steel of the corrugated roof. It is a reminder that, thermodynamically, I live in a cave (but with windows). I imagine that if humans abandoned this space for a hundred years, we'd have some pretty sweet stalagtites. In the meantime, this slow and grandly patient geological process, goes just fast enough to keep me awake. The noise worries me. The moisture is concerning. Mostly because I keep thinking long term. "2 years," I say. And I imagine the moisture creeping into my books and clothes. Finding soft yellow mould growing on the armpits of my sweaters. I imagine the house on Paper street; my objects slowly digesting themselves from the inside out.
Each object has its own peculiar sound when struch by a drop, like a set of tuned drums. The roof slopes from highest near the back to lowest near the windows at the front, so the power and amplitude of the beat varies as much as the timbre of the resonating surface.
The easy (or easiest) solution is to get up and open all the windows. If its as cold out there as it is in here, then the cold steel of the roof won't act as a condensing surface, drawing together moisture out of the relatively warmer and wetter air. A dynamic that, at this moment, reminds me of drinking iced coffee at the Starbucks across from Wrigley, sitting in the 90 degree heat, plastic cup beaded with perspiration in the hot summer sun.
In addition to being an irksome reminder of how long it has been since I had any real coffee, this bright summery image of Chicago in August is a stark contrast as I lay, hood up, in a sweatshirt, thermal shirt, undershirt, long-johns, wool socks, sleeping bag and sheet pocket, with an extra sweater and vest draped over me in the pre-dawn pitch dark.
Did I mention I live very near to the equator?
I suppose I'll just get up. Going back to sleep for an hour isn't necessarily appealing. Plus, the four guys from Kenya Power, the ones bringing stima - electricity - to Talai (who live next door to me in a space a quarter the size of my sitting room) sound like they are awake. Or at least cold and dripped on enough in the dark to not be asleep. And so, soon enough, they will get up and put on Kiss FM, Kenya's #1 radio station. The interview I read with the superstar studio director says that he turned the station around by playing the music that people want to hear. That means the same extraordinarily catchy yet rather indistinctive American pop pouring out of some 16 year old girls boombox as she sits baking on North Avenue Beach right now.
Boy, I'm cold.
They will play the radio at the same volume as all the other radios here in Kenya: two notches too high for the tinny, cheap speakers the music is coming thru. The bass will be washed out or crackle thru the broken speaker cone. Somewhere in East Africa, there is a new boombox or radio, one that has not yet been blown out by the rhythmic pumping beat of J.T. bringing sexy back, but not here, not today.
So I'll get up.
I'll make chai. Milky and sweet black tea with my last two pieces of white bread. ("Wheat bread? You are the Diabetic?") Red plum jelly and Blue Band Margarine. I have two eggs to hard boil, a heat of the moment, gametime breakfast decision, after finding yesterday that - well, obviously - there is no bread in town on Sundays.
I'll study Kiswahili, read some more T.E. Lawrence. I'll open all the goddamned windows. I'll prepare for my first day of work at the Ministry of Health Dispensary in Talai and think about which road I want to walk down this afternoon greeting people, practicing the language and ostensibly filling the time until I make dinner.
I will read and write by Kerosene lamp. I will put on more clothes to sleep than I wore during the day.
I will hope for a night without the steady thrumming of ice cold rain on my thin metal roof.
But I kind of doubt it.