A fit of pique

To go to bed in a fit of pique when there is so much wrong in the world because the forecast rain did not arrive seems a little de trop, non? But that is me.

Three different forecasts put rain on our parched table and what did we get?

A freshening breeze and a fall in pressure and a lilting of temperature that would make a 20-floor lift blush.

A sprinkling from clouds that seemed to part and leave the sun to shine over us.

Northward Emilia was swimming in the stuff. A crafty breakaway soaked southward Arezzo. But here on my side of the effing mountain it was hot, humid and, frankly, embarrassing.

There must be a word for it, as Aimee Mann said...the word for the intense saudaje, the perplexed helplessness of failed expectation and cancelled release when the forecast rain does not come.

It’s akin to a kid not getting the Christmas present they wished for and of which they’d been delivered a fair expectation that it too would come.

But you promised. But you promised. But you promised. My heart breaking at the little tool kit I was not given.

This morning I’d slept in. I’d deliberately not watered. I dreamt of tanks full, pumps running at full bore, drip irrigators bursting, the heat vanquished, the delight of a world drenched and perfumed in rain.

And we got what ? The same old hard stubborn ground, the terra bassa, the orto che ti vuol morto, the massacring allotment, the sticky long-sleeved sweat soaked second-hand close-wove Fatface shirt of destiny.

You can stick it, the whole micro-climate, terroir-obsessed, self congratulatory bollocks of place space and weather, of rain shadows and leeward slopes, of foen winds and occluded fronts.

I just want water. From the sky. Now.