Let there be pula!

Tuesday

Living in Sacramento for nearly four years, I had more than my share of days of rain, fog and gray skies in the winter months. Everyone who knows me knows how I whine about it, especially in January. It’s not rain that I dislike – it’s the endless stretch of drizzly days that make me want to put my head under a down comforter and refuse to come out until April. I miss the thunderstorms of the South. Brief. Dramatic. Hair-raising shakeups. They put some punctuation on the day.

At first light in Gaborone we are having a delicious one, surpassing even the spectacular sky shows of Texas. Pula! Good pula! The cracks of thunder shake the windows, then roll out in angry echoes rumbling into the distance. Lightning flashes. The chickens somewhere in the neighborhood are perturbed.
Not I.
The rain, steady now, falls onto a tin shed behind my bedroom in a constant beat. The air smells crisp-clean as the water mixes with the parched dust on our subdivision’s dirt roads. For a country the British once called the thirst land, pula is good medicine.

Though it is the rainy season in Botswana, the sun will come calling soon.