I’m working outside today, even though it’s raining, and even though it’s chilly, because the magnolia tree is in bloom and the tiny green hydrangea buds are beginning to unfold and the air smells all of petrichor. Plus, did I mention it’s raining?

Junebug and I took a walk this morning on the trail that winds alongside the river. We do this most every day, but today the grey skies made the young leaves on their spindly branches look like a bright green haze all along the trail. Geese scolded us from the water when we ran down to chase them, and even after it started hailing, Junebug took every opportunity to prance down to the river bank and squish mud between her toes while I watched the river scored with tiny hailstones.

In Southern California, where I grew up, people either love the rain, having been deprived of it for 90% of their natural lives, or they resent it as an affront to their God-given right to enjoy brilliant sunshine twenty-four hours a day (this type also tends to be suspicious of the night). It is true that California drivers sometimes lose their minds in any type of precipitation. “THE MOST DANGEROUS TIME TO DRIVE IS RIGHT WHEN IT STARTS RAINING AFTER A LONG DRY SPELL,” I tell people who don’t live there. “IT BRINGS THE OILS UP FROM THE ROAD AND MAKES EVERYTHING SLIPPERIER—MORE SLIPPERY? SLIPPERY…ER. YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING. THE ROADS ARE SLICK!”

This year it’s rained much more than usual there. Painted Lady butterflies have flown through in droves, and a superbloom of wildflowers blanketing the hillsides was visible from space. Some mornings, the canyon roads will be misty all the way out to the beach, where the grey horizon blurs with the green-glass ocean so that you can’t tell just where the water ends and sky begins.

On mornings like that, I used to cut school and drive out there, sitting on the beach by myself and thinking long thoughts until the the fog burned off. Which, I admit, is a very moody-teenager thing to do, but it’s an urge I will probably never outgrow. I know the sun improves your mood and whatever, but it’s also brash and glaring and burns your skin and gets in your eyes while you’re driving and gives some people headaches and makes other people say things like, “Hot enough for ya?”

Rain, though, makes everything soft and cozy and a little bit drowsy. The streets empty out so that you suspect you might be the only person in the world, and places you walk every day start to look dreamy and foreign. Conversations stretch deeper, and coffee tastes better, and raindrops on any surface is objectively the best sound there is. Most of my favorite memories happened in the rain—probably because it stirs something up in people all magic-like. I know I talk about the rain a lot, but honestly I will never get my fill of it.

I know I’m not the only person who runs a little mad in foul weather, or feels disappointed when the forecast promises another week of sun, or reads Ray Bradbury and thinks, “You know, Venus sounds lovely.” Of course, you are free to argue that sun is better than rain. Come sit here next to me, on the porch, under this blanket, and we’ll talk all about it, while the rain patters on the roof and drips off the new leaves.

There, now, isn’t this nice?