Precipitation.

The morning's weather report listed a better-than-even chance of rain this afternoon through this evening. The afternoon arrived and still no rain, but the probability kicked up. The afternoon progressed, and it kept ticking from fifty to seventy to ninety, with increasing severity, going from showers to heavy rain to deep storms. All I could do was keep waiting and listen to the air and feel how it slipped against my face. Heavy humidity, sickly overcast clouds, barely any breezes. I ran my errands and drank iced coffee and turned on the fans and waited. I went to my parents' building, and waited.

My parents' building is several stories taller than mine, with a much nicer roof: both because it's got a more convivial atmosphere because more people tend to use it, and because being taller gives it a better view to the Hudson and the west. When my dad and I went up, there were already a couple other people there, and it wasn't many minutes before some other people we knew well joined us too. By the time they did, we'd heard some many-miles distant rumbling and counted a handful of lightning sightings both north and south of us.

All the while, we watched the skies and waited. The clouds were magnificent, in depth and size and scale: thin clouds covering up nearly all of the sky, heavy billowing and bellowing formations beneath them, solid masses spinning out into fragile tendrils at their edges. Looming but not ominous, because there wasn't any mistaking what was coming, and it was clear how little time there was to wait. We couldn't have seen it from the ground. From that high up, it was clear what was coming, and where it was coming from. Not long after we went from my dad and myself to my dad, myself, and two of his friends, I exclaimed we could see it raining across the Hudson in New Jersey. And almost no time after that, it was raining up and down New Jersey and moving in fast. There were still a few flashes of far-off lightning, and most of the sky was simply the clouds.

A few drops of rain hit and the people who'd already been on the roof went down. The wind picked up and his friends went down. We stayed, watching and listening, the lightning gone and the wind angry at us for staying, but we didn't let it stop us. It was raining in New Jersey, and it was raining on the Hudson. It was raining on the Hudson and it was raining just in Manhattan. And it was raining on us, at last. We'd seen it come in and were there when it arrived.

It came in with that lovely petrochor smell, when water hits dry ground, dry surfaces, dry dirt and pushes that dryness up into the air where the aroma can finally hit. It came with a fabulous set of noises as the small and large drops hit and the clouds kept rumbling as the water fell. It came with a break in the day at long last, with the fever going down and everything going easy for just long enough to remind us what easy could feel like.

I can understand why nobody else was there to watch, and at the same time, I can't understand it at all.

Also of note: one of the people who joined us moved to the States from England, and brought a snack with him that included some chutney. I commented that chutney must make him chuffed, and he said he almost didn't hear me because he didn't expect to hear "chuffed" from a Yank - I've never been called such before, and it had me chuffed to hear it - to which I said, "I've seen my share of Monty Python."