Dancing in the rain. Hooray!

Posted on by

For months now, we’ve been teased.

Women have threatened to dance at wine o clock – wearing fascinators and feathers, their shoulders squared and a far-into-the-distance stare fixed on their botoxed faces.

Scientific puppetmasters have talked about (and possibly carried out) cloud seeding, in which steel lampshade-like ionisers create artificial clouds in the desert sky.

Then, last night, it finally happened: it rained.

And I slept through the whole thing, even the thunder and lightening that I’m told occurred.

It was nothing like a few years ago, when Dubai had hail stones so bad that all the cars were left with an ‘eggshell’ finish and we thought it was the end of the world.

But when we got up this morning, there was a strange darkness creeping round the curtains – Twitter was buzzing with rain tweets from Dubai-ians and the ground was actually wet.

The kids pressed their noses against the window and I joined them, peering out at the marvellous colours: the rain washes all the sand away and so instead of the tans and beiges we’ve been seeing recently, the trees and plants looked green. It’s like seeing your garden in technicolour and appreciating that it’s a lush oasis in the desert, not just a dusty yard.

Even the birds looked like they were dancing!

The world may watch us, rather bemused by our excitement, but when you live in a region where there’s only on average 13cm of rain a year, it’s the equivalent of a white Christmas every time it rains.

Ironically, DH was just off to Toronto and talking about sunscreen. They put it on in the cockpit as they fly over the North Pole apparently. I offered him one of my five or six bottles of sun tan lotion, before waving him off to the airport – and seeing the boys off to school.

Then I sat down with a cup of tea, my eyes glancing skywards at the grey clouds gathered above, and enjoyed an atmospheric, almost romantic (!) couple of hours on the laptop – the ground, by now, completely dry again and not a spot of rain in sight.

Oh well, there’s always next year.

12 thoughts on “Dancing in the rain. Hooray!”

  2. Sounds like our years in Arizona – the boys would run in and outside, getting more and more excited as the clouds approached, and – if there was no thunder or lightning – running outside to play in the rain. Like it is for you, rain was a major event for us – and just as rare! I remember once starting up my windshield wipers only to have them literally crumble to dust in one or two passes – they hadn’t been used in so long, they’d completely dried out.
    Enjoy your lovely rain!

  3. I woke up by the thunder early this morning and both me and hubby had to rush out to actually get a closer look! Remember the wonderful rain- and thunder storms we had in Singapore, miss them actually! But it smelled lovely this morning!

  4. This time of year and into summer, we have a lot of thunder storms and torrential rain in Chicago. Trouble is, our roof is leaking and we can’t find the place where the water is coming in. Sigh!

    • Good luck finding that roof leak! Sounds elusive. I miss the massive thunderstorms we used to get in Florida – mind you if we had them here, the villas would leak all over the place – they just don’t *do* rain here!

  5. I think I would really miss rain too. (Although i can’t say that year living in Cardiff was my favourite – I just remember the puddle that lived continually outside the door of our house, so you always got your feet wet when trying to get in). How funny that they have to wear sunscreen in the cockpit – that had never occurred to me!

  6. Oh goodness – I can’t imagine feeling that way about the rain! Not that I dislike rain, in fact I like the sound of it and I like being inside on a wet and windy day. But I really dislike being out in the rain.

    • The big problem with rain here is the drainage is terrible – it actually floods!! And the drivers who aren’t used to driving in the rain. More like aqua-planing than driving…

Comments are closed.