The rain is coming down heavily, splashing against the window and pounding the pavement.  I sit by the window in my warm house, watching it fall in buckets. It is falling so forcefully that it is making the delicate branches of the rose flowers in my front yard bow low to the ground and a lot of them lie scattered.

     The wind is blowing now; it is not really all that strong, but chilly and penetrating. "Chilly springs bring pouring rains," a popular Taiwanese saying goes. In Taiwan, once it's spring, you never know if it's the cold that brings the rain, or the other way around. In spring, cold and rain seem to be inseparable companions.

     The weather man on the radio station says that a good two inches of rain will accumulate
today, but I think this rain, though unusually fierce, will not last long. In Ajax, the sun comes in unequal measures; in Taipei - the capital city of Taiwan and the place where I grew up - the rain always stays, especially in late spring, the rainy season called the "Plum Rain Season" when it rains, rains, and rains constantly for about three to four weeks almost non-stop. Now, I live in Canada, and I am luckily spared this damply climatological phenomenon, but the rain already sticks in my memory, a constant backdrop to the row-upon-row of two-story attached brick houses where I spent my childhood.

      The Rain reminds me of how, as a child, I would sit by the front screen door facing the main street and stare out at the rain. I enjoyed seeing that people rushed along the sidewalk, pulling their coats over their heads in an attempt to avoid the forceful downpour, and that the rainwater splashed back up in a dense spray as people trod over the puddle road; particularly, I enjoyed listening to the rhythmic, pata pata sound of the rain's bombarding the surface of the road.  While I was sitting inside my warm house and watching them, these sounds and sights, somehow, made me feel safe and secure.

The rain also puts into my mind the smell of my mother. She always had her eye watchfully on the weather, ready at the first sign of rain to rush out and fetch the washing off the clothes lines. I can remember the way she smelled when she came in the door with two handfuls of clothes: damp and cold. It seemed to me that the rain had penetrated into her skin, her muscles, and her bones, depleting them of life and warmth.

I was mistaken, and the rain keeps falling down, without the slightest hint of letting up. The rhythmic, pata pata sound is reigning in my memory.

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