Rainy days

After a glitteringly beautiful August, the rainy days have come. Bands of mist hang against the sides of the mountains, and the colors have muted themselves, clamped closer together in the wet.

Sometimes I feel confused about rain. There is of course beauty in rainy days. Particular things, like the water clinging to grass blades, like the painterly gradation that the mist makes over the forest on the opposite side of the fjord. It’s beautiful to be cozy with a pair of candles glowing on a rainy evening.

But it’s a beauty I have to remind myself to see. It’s not the kind that, for me, announces itself like the grandeur of a brilliant sunset. Rainy weather doesn’t have the camera pulling constantly out of my pocket or the urge to get out into it for a hike. On these rainy days, I lament the gray a bit. I wonder if there will be sun tomorrow. I look for beauty in it because I know I will find it, and that will make the day better, but not because that beauty has come incessantly tapping on my shoulder.

It’s not just me. I post pictures of the rainy days sometimes–I tried this systematically a couple of years ago, because I didn’t like the way my photographs were unrepresentative. I take and post a disproportionate number of sunny pictures, when this place is disproportionately gray. But when I post the rainy pictures, I get far fewer likes and comments.

I suppose this is cultural, that it could be, in a different social system, the reverse, us all hanging onto photographs of rainy weather as the most beautiful. Or is there something more universal than that, some hardwired preference for the bright beams of the sun? Where does beauty get defined? That’s what I’m wondering this morning.