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Oh this is hard going.  My sister loves the rain, and I do too, with all its life-giving abundance and its very wateriness, but when it goes on for days it feels as though the sky is crying and I cry along with the sad clouds.  The thought of having the discipline to write this blog for another 276 days is a heavy black gloom hanging over my head on this bleak day. 

I remember learning about the water cycle at school, and that there was a pretty picture which is probably everyone's first encounter with this phenomenon, looking something like this:

I remember thinking that this was why we got so much rain, because we lived right next to a mountain, Devil's Peak in Cape Town. According to the picture, it only rains over the mountain!  It was a revelation that the water I encountered was not new.  That it just went round and round in this amazing cycle, the same water, just changing form constantly, just like all the energy of the world.

It was the same type of epiphany as when I suddenly understood that the light from stars is actually old light, that the stars shining in our sky, the romantic impossibly numerous stars, might actually be long gone, dead suns.  It is only their little photons which they sent out all that time ago, finally striking the photoreceptors which send the signals to the optic nerve at the back of our eyes and finally to the visual cortex at the very back of the brain which creates the image we see.  Magnificent.  Such beautiful knowledge.

When I was young I loved walking in the rain. My dog and I would go for long solitary (the dog and I were of the same mind in this) rambles through our deserted suburb.  There would be few people out, as not many shared this desire for the knowledge of dripping hedges, singing trees, happy frogs, the luscious smells of wet grass and sodden soil, and your own intricate thoughts which seemed to flow easier with all that flowing on and around you. 

It had begun when I was quite small, four or five, and we would get cabin fever from the wet weather, so my dad would take me for long walks and teach me how to engineer dams in gutters in the back-roads, or in little streams in the veld.  Such streams only existed while the rain came down, then dried up soon after in the South African sun and wind.  Later in life I took my own children for similar walks, and we spent hours making dams with sticks and stones and mud, getting drenched in the process and happy as dripping seals.

We were in the city today and Tim always asks me which way I want him to drive home.  Today I chose Route 1, because we get to go over the Tobin Bridge, the enormously high bridge linking Boston and Chelsea, built between 1948 and 1950.

Tobin Bridge

I love bridges.  Such an incredible end-result of abstract thought, the problem of getting from here to there over a previously impossible obstacle, a chasm, a river, a stretch of ocean. My dad loved them too and always told me (in his protracted way of telling stories, inherited by his grandson Nicholas), how they were made.  He would explain how suspension bridges hold themselves up, or how the cantilevers on bridges like the Tobin work, which Benjamin Baker, the famous British civil engineer, demonstrated like this:

The Tobin Bridge spans the Mystic River, its highest point is 250ft (76m), and when you are travelling southbound on Route 1 over the bridge, you travel more than 100 ft (30m) from the top of the bridge to the tunnel exit into Charlestown.

High winds travel through the bridge by design, and you can feel the lift sometimes on rough days when you are near the toll-booths on the southbound level, the top deck of the bridge. 

It is so high so that ships can go by happily underneath, and its navigable waterway opening measures 340ft (103m) wide by 100ft (30m) high. 

85000 cars go over the Tobin every day, and here is a picture of the very first morning traffic.

Bridges span actual stumbling blocks, but of course bridges are also a wonderful metaphor for how to get over something in life, or be helped to, as in Bridge over Troubled Water, the wonderful song by Simon & Garfunkel. They also show our faith in the human being's ability to create these amazing structures, and the conviction that we have in crossing them, both literally and figuratively.

Footbridge over the Storm River Mouth, South Africa.