I love when you can feel it coming—when you just stand on your porch or your balcony or on the sidewalk and turn your face to the breeze, sensing the electricity in the air as you realize you are holding your breath in anticipation for the first drop to fall.
I love how it feels on your skin—how each following drop seems to be a different temperature than the last as they splatter on your forearms and give you the chills as they splash on the back of your neck. I love how the pavement’s breath seems to reach up toward the sky, as if begging it to again quench its thirst.
And of course, I love the smell of rain. It is no surprise that the rain here in Munich has a different scent than the rain of New Mexico. Here, the rain smells of the grit that you can feel and hear crunch under your feet as you walk atop the cobblestones; it smells of the flowers that beckon to the passersby from their shelves in front of the Blumen shops, and the earthy tones of soil and old wood, as if someone succeeded in bottling the essence of log cabin and added a drop or two to the mix.
The scent of New Mexican rain is one you can taste. The rain hangs heavy in the air, weighed down by the desert sand. Here, the drizzle is warm—the kind of rain shower that makes you take off your shoes, peel off your socks, roll up your jeans and bound outside to let the mini river that is swiftly coursing by the curb flow up and around your bare feet as it finds the fastest route downward. This rain causes waterfalls that last only for a few minutes, but if you are lucky enough to know where to go, you can be a witness to the cascading streams’ sporadic moments of fame.
It is not only my plan to compare the rains of Munich and New Mexico, but I intend to compare many things about the two vastly different places in my upcoming blogs. I think this will paint a better picture of my time over here and how my life in one location contrasts my life in another.
So please stay tuned…
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