By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

BECAUSE Filipinos only experience two seasons, we invariably attach much meaning and sentiment to both. Summer–the dry season–becomes an idyll of beaches, sunshine, freedom and long days. The other season, the wet or rainy season, becomes a poignant period of showers, cool afternoons and dreaming.

Most Filipino school children longed for summer, longed to be released squealing from their restrictive classrooms into the seemingly endless–but altogether too short–months of April and May. But I always preferred the rainy season, the raindrops of June and July, together with the pitter patter of rain as you dropped off to sleep at night.

June and July also came with its requisite typhoons of course and everyone became a radio listener as we begged for a day off from school even as the floods rose and the winds howled.

But as I grew older, I learned to appreciate the rainy season even more. Rain, you see, compresses time. There’s no telling what hour it is in the middle of a rainstorm. It’s like time literally stops to matter. All you have is the rain and you. It’s an unforgettable sensation, like kissing a girl in the gentle drizzle, or the barest hint of sunlight passing through the fragments of cloud and coldness. And people flee indoors. Some people liked to cuddle up with a book. Others cuddle up with someone they cherish. Rain translates our moods for us. If lonely, rain weeps. If happy, rain consoles. I always liked to sit by a window and just look out the window for hours, just listening to the individual raindrops dance on whatever surface they could encounter as I dreamt of poetry and better times.