I am at that point, like the car battery in Becca’s Write on Wednesday suddenly giving up, and I panick about what to do next, about feeling it’s all hopeless. The weather is just so bad, and it affects my mood and then I find myself writing this:
I don’t do any serious writing today. It’s too wet outside, it’s been raining as if I’m back being ten years old and living in The Netherlands and the summer holidays have just started: it’s always raining. Trees are drooping green with leaves that suck up the water and that overpower me, they are so smug and self satisfied. They don’t care about you or me, they just want all that rain, and appropriate the summer as theirs. It’s always been like this and always will be and it stops me from doing anything, anything at all, I can only watch and submerge and hope that I come out of it all again, dry. There’s no time for sun here, nor for light and a bit of carelessness and forgetting. Perhaps there’s a poem in there, somewhere, but I am too embalmed in all this rain to take my writing seriously.
I feel helpless when the weather turns this way, in the middle of the summer, when it should be light and cheerful, but it never is, not here, not in this part of Europe. There’s only this heavy summer wetness, overpowering and green, a lushness that is unforgivable, depressing, it sucks you up and swallows you up. I am taken in and cannot help it, I’m helpless. I now am the wet tree and the grass and the dog that shits on the grass at the side of the road and is then pulled along by its owner under a large and wet umbrella. I cannot move.
The yellow and green and blue and white flowers are simply pictures in the flowerbeds, they were always there, they know their worth and do not care about me or my feeling and my inability to write, to write properly, to write my novel, my questions, my helplessness.
Cars pass by in their own slow motion, they are indifferent like the rest of the landscape. It’s never been any different.
So, that’s writing on Wednesday this week, a very wet Wednesday here in England.
51stories 
Oh my, you are not drained, you’re drowning! It is depressing when the weather is uncomfortable and relentlessly so. I feel that way sometimes in winter here, when every day is gray and cold. And even sometimes in Florida in summer, when every day is hot, damp, and humid.
Right now our weather is picture perfect. I should be reveling and writing up a storm, shouldn’t I?
Here’s hoping you dry out soon 🙂
By: Becca on July 10, 2008
at 12:39 am
Oh, dear — I know precisely what you mean about the weather. I’m enjoying a beautiful day today, but we’ve had more than our share of rain here in Michigan this spring and early summer. All I want to do then is nap! I hope it soon clears up so you can get some of your sunshine back!
By: jeanie on July 10, 2008
at 2:44 pm
Isn’t it amazing how much the weather can affect a mood? The bad weather during the winter makes me annoyed and irritable.
By: Kim L on July 11, 2008
at 12:00 am
Curious, isn’t it, that many of the best works of art and literature have been made in poor weather and in poor human conditions, with tyrannies doing the most execrable of actions.
Imagination is the word here.
By: Jose on July 11, 2008
at 6:18 am
Well I like your writing on the rain – it’s very atmospheric. And I can relate since this is the first proper non-rainy day we’ve had in Cape Town for about two weeks. Perhaps you can go with the flow and write about your childhood in the Netherlands.
By: couchtrip on July 11, 2008
at 1:14 pm
Becca: thank you for commisserating, I think I came up again 🙂
Jeanie: still up and down, at least there are spells of sunshine in between. Soooo much better
Kim L: but it’s summer now….. it should not be like that….
Jose: thank you for the endless faith and optimistic nudges!
couchtrip: I was doing that…. it made me even more depressed! 🙂 But as said before, I’m up and dry again.
By: seachanges on July 11, 2008
at 3:42 pm