When my partner George died in October one of the things I dreaded was the coming rainy season. No more beautiful blue and yellow days, long twilit evenings, silken roses in overflowing gardens. I feared I had only darkness and storms ahead. Grayness inside and out.

One soft, misty January day, walking a trail along the edge of a mountain, stopping to look at the gray-green canyon sweeping down and then up below me, I realized how wrong my foreboding had been, and how cosmic a source of consolation rain can be.