Rain Rain Go Away, Stay Away, Do Not Come Back, Oh My God Stop Already

After a very brief respite the heavy rains have continued, both inside and outside the palaceta (for new readers, the palaceta is what we call the big old house, aka Brokedown Palace, where we’ve lived for the past year). In between deluges the h installed plastic sheeting outside the double doors of the kitchen, which has stopped the worst of the flooding. Bowed but unbeaten by the neverending rain, our guest Linda has moved the grill from the kitchen courtyard to the carport and cooks via headlamp - last night we had grilled teriyaki chicken (sorry guys, I whisper to the sleeping flock) and butternut squash soup with julienned carrots and peas from Alberto’s garden.

All the rain has pushed the workers back indoors. Even they are sick of it - the moment it let up they asked the h for outdoor priorities, cleaning and sealing the leaks in the garage roof, patching paredes around the apple orchard, draining and scrubbing down the coral reef koi pond, and leveling the ground and hauling gravel for the base of the greenhouse waiting to be assembled. Although there is no rush now - Alberto was anxious to give us some tomato plants for our little glass house but the excessive rain has caused them to sprout a killing mold.

With the rains re-starting the workers were driven back into the quinta where the new floor is now installed in the lower story, which will someday be a guest house but sooner than that will be where we move, abandoning the big dark leaky drafty palaceta. Despite the many inconveniences of living quinhentos yards away from electricity and plumbing, I have grown used to living here. However I will not miss the distressing sound of rain pattering through the holes in the ceiling of the living room and into the buckets we’ve scattered about. We keep the doors to that room closed and try to ignore what we have no ability to change just now - but I can hear the steady stream of water merrily hitting plastic through the double doors.

Tiptoeing across the newly laid quinta floor because it feels too nice to walk on it, I am so glad the h had the prescience to order something waterproof. It looks like wood, and feels like wood, but turns out it is not wood but some German-made technological marvel that is ecologically sound, horribly expensive, and with a layer of cork between it and the bad tile that came with the house, feels very luxurious underfoot.

I thought it was wood, I marvel as Jake flops down on it, grunting his approval. No, the h says. That would not be a good choice here. He shows me the indoor humidity and temperature gauge he just bought - in that moment it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit (but felt 40) and 85 percent humidity but of course felt 100% because IT WON’T STOP RAINING.

The workers notice me continually cleaning up my footprints (I put paper towels under each shoe and then do a slidey-skatey dance all over the floor) and lay a cardboard path from the door to the kitchen. They are thoughtful like that, always trying to save me from myself. The floor does not need to be protected from my wet footsteps - it was practically made for wet footsteps - I know this intellectually, but nevertheless I feel compelled to wipe up the little drips and drops and puddles we make every time we come in from the rain which is NEVERENDING.

Yesterday the workers finished installing the baseboards, which feature built-in LED lighting so now our floor looks like it is ringed with glow-in-the-dark Hot Wheels tracks. Our bank account cried out in the night, waking me but it wasn’t a thief just the window company completing the h’s order for windows for the entire guest house. It will be nice to look up at the second and third stories and not see black holes like missing teeth; also it will be nice not to find tiny beautiful perfect dead songbirds on the floor, having flown in through the missing windows and then killing themselves with exhaustion trying to find their way back out.

Ever since we started renovations in the guest house that will shortly become our home I imagined that we would put lockers in the entryway, which doubles as a laundry room. Last week I found the perfect solucao - a custom-made affair of wood and metal being sold by a couple in Lisbon who are moving and find the piece - which is two meters tall and two meters wide - too large for their new space. The lockers, wood and metal framing are sourced from Portuguese schools and businesses, creating a design that is both retro-nostalgic and modern-industrial, a description I just made up but sounds design-school official and as awesome as the piece looks. We were lucky to have two strong workers with a truck to help us pick it up, it took three men to disassemble and load it. By some miracle it stopped raining for the two hours it took them to go pick it up and haul it back.

With the floors installed and the walls patched and swanky baseboards in place, all the sanding and sawing are complete and we can finally order and install the sinks and countertops for the bathroom and kitchen. Step by step the h says, all cheery, and I repress the desire to punch him, chalking it up to the stress of the NEVERENDING RAIN. The sound does get to one, after A WHOLE MONTH.

Yesterday the rain was so bad, Instagram was full of businesses in Lisbon posting videos of streets turned to rivers, garbage cans floating away, the rushing water obscuring the wheels of the parked cars. A friend shared a video of a waterspout whirling next to the Vasco de Gama bridge. Is this near you? she typed. Hahaha it’s my kitchen, I replied. Which sounds ungrateful as with the h’s jerry rigged repair the kitchen leaked only a little in the latest deluge, I was able to mop it up in one go, not like earlier in the week when I could barely keep pace with the water as it poured under the door and across the floor with me establishing a rhythm of mop curse squeegee mop curse squeegee mop squeegee (I got tired of cursing, it wasn’t having any effect) and filling the bucket in fifteen minutes. At least my floor is SPARKLING CLEAN.

The rain is so bad that the rat that we saw scurrying on two separate occasions on the property this past week was found by the h in the koi pond, which just a few days ago was drained dry, but now contains enough inches of rainwater to drown Senhor Rato. Even though I hate rats - most especially because they represent such a danger to chicks being born to our flock - it was a bad way to die. A famous experiment in the 1950s at Johns Hopkins that involved putting rats in buckets of water and then watching what happens (ugh, humans sometimes) demonstrated that rats can swim for up to three days before succumbing to exhaustion and drowning. We haven’t seen Senhor Rato for two days now. It is entirely possible the poor, awful thing has been swimming, bedraggled, all this time. Maybe that’s why the roosters have been crowing so much lately - in triumph. Eff you, rat, they are saying. You killed Leia’s brother Luke and now it’s your-or-or-or tuuuuurn!

The Johns Hopkins experiment was interesting because it demonstrated plausibly that rats, not unlike humans, live longer when they have hope. The domesticated rats swam in their death-buckets for days before giving up. Wild rats, it was theorized, would live even longer, as, by dint of their wildness they would be even more prepared to fight fiercely for their lives. But that turned out not to be true; the wild rats drowned sooner. It was ascertained, then proven by another round of rats-in-death-buckets, that the rats only swam for a long time when they had hope of being rescued. When they had no hope of being rescued they succumbed in just fifteen minutes. It does make me feel better to think Senhor Rato died quickly, however the image of him swimming around the lengthy perimeter of the koi pond in the dark, a phalanx of roosters gazing implacably down at him, crowing exultantly as he became weaker, persists. I am a horror writer after all.

Today dawned sunny and warm. Oh my god SUN everyone said upon waking and walking into the front room. We squinted away from it like vampires who have been hidden away from the sun for centuries which we sort of are because it WON’T STOP RAINING. Jake immediately asked to go out and lay on his mat on the front porch - in the past few days he has had precious few walks. The one walk we got yesterday was hurried - the sky low and gray and ready to start spitting at us. Still, we managed to see something new - the prettiest bus stop in the world.

I looked out the window just now and the roosters taking a page from Jake’s book are gathered around him, lounging on the welcome mat and on the sun-warmed steps like a band posing for an album cover.

Even baby Leia demands to be let out of her box to walk cheep-cheeping around the floor, choosing the spot where the sun slants through the front windows and warms the tiles. I have always wanted an Easter chick (and a bunny, if truth be known), and for better or worse now I have one.

The weather forecast is for rain of course but for now we are all enjoying the sunshine. We scurry back and forth from the palaceta and quinta (where the dishwasher, washer and dryer reside) with loads of laundry and dishes - another guest arrives today. I sing loudly as I walk on the quinta road, not realizing for a bit why the song Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, Aaaaaa-aaa-aaa-aaa-aaa-ale-luuu-u-ia! comes to mind, other than the fact that I went to Catholic school for eight years, going to church six times a week (more on holy days of obligations) and so often sing hymns because they are songs I heard first and most frequently and also many are set to cool classical music like Beethoven’s Ninth. Then I notice the workers aren’t here though it’s 8:15a - they are so prompt you can set your watch by them - and this is how I come to realize it is Good Friday.

The morning sun glows greenly through the new leaves on the medieval plane tree; tiny yellow flowers sprout on the mossy walls that line the garden. Everywhere there is the sound of the roosters - themselves a symbol of the passion of the Christ, I recently learned - crowing from the orchard, from the coop courtyard, from the base of the driveway, even from the garden where I know they are snatching their beaks through the chicken wire that lays on top of the cabbage.

Hurray, they seem to be saying. Hur-ur-ur-ur-urray! I feel an urge to crow with them, even as the gray clouds are moving in with their freight of rain.