Galvin crop

Rain … nature’s metaphorical cliche.

Poets, filmmakers, songwriters and novelists — even lowly newspaper columnists — have turned to the silver lining accompanying an approaching dark cloud to alleviate the anxiety of an artistic drought.

We trick ourselves into believing there’s more to drizzles and downpours than just water leaving the sky.

As Carole King reassured us in a scientific principle as of yet deemed a hoax, rain is wet; but, more than that, it chills our souls down to the marrow.

But, really, does it?

Sure, while the current Rogue Valley forecast says it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall for most of the next week or so, that doesn’t mean we can’t love a rainy night, especially if our windshield wipers are keeping perfect rhythm with the song on the radio-oh.

Some, meanwhile, find laughter in the rain as long, that is, as we’re walkin’ hand-in-hand with the one we love.

Children, for the most part, love the rain — stomping around in puddles, sliding across the lawn, tussling with their equally happy dogs.

It’s their parents (who apparently have short memories) who see the disadvantages, perhaps because raindrops hit their heads before they fall onto the noggins of their kids.

It’s a tough lesson for the young ones, brought in from a shower and ordered to strip down and head to the bathroom to take a … hey, wait a minute.

And while damp dogs can shake it off swiftly, try dealing with a damp cat.

Ducks and beavers have no problem with the rain, which seems appropriate for Oregon — where, the under-informed on the other side of the country repeatedly proclaim, it rains all the time.

Little do they know.

Speaking of school athletics (yes, I was), the first newspaper story I was ever assigned as a professional whatever-it-is-I-was was to travel by steam-powered ferry to Martha’s Vineyard island and cover a high school football game.

It poured all the way across the sound. It poured all through the game. And it poured all the way back to the mainland.

There was no press box, so the pages of my notebook became a sea of illegible blue ink. Shielding wouldn’t have helped anyway, for the crosswinds were so strong that the rain whipped sideways, and often changed directions.

By the time I arrived back to the office and sat behind an available Royal, whatever I had managed to scribble was reduced to a faint impression. I knew the final score, a 24-6 defeat for the home team, but what I pounded out on those keys was a mixture of memory and make-believe.

In retrospect, that first assignment might have influenced my entire career.

It would not be the only time rain impacted life choices. Back when we spent four years in Florida — a period of time we now refer to as The Bleak Decade — sheets of water pelted the lawn at my in-laws’ home.

Up from the ground came, not a bubblin’ crude, but a lemon-lime chemical concoction that convinced us that we weren’t going to wait around to see what deformed creatures would emerge from that primordial ooze.

(Turns out, it was more Floridians.)

But that was then, and this is now, and this spate of precipitation, while certainly welcome, arrives with the cruel irony that it doesn’t go away and come back some other day, when it could attenuate the environmental impacts felt during our extended summers.

So there’s an underlying sadness at the moment, as the inconvenient truth of the matter is that these rainy days are as much a messy annoyance as they are a panacea for what ails us.

Rain is wet. After that, we’re on our own.