The Falling of the Rain

Yesterday evening, when I walked out onto the teacher's patio at work, I noticed a strange edginess in the air and the color of the aftersun sky reflecting off the sides of buildings seemed somehow different from usual.  "It feels like rain," I announced.  Of course, I was joking since not one drop of rain has fallen over Egypt since I arrived in mid-July.  There is no such thing as a summer rain here.  Rain in Egypt can only mean one thing: the coming of winter.  

In Uruguay, I remember missing peanut butter; in the States, mate and dulce de leche.  Here in Egypt, of all the things there are to miss, I find myself most often longing for two things: red wine and rain.  I awoke this morning just before dawn to a strange sound.  In my sleepy daze, I wondered if there was a giant cobra hissing just outside my window.  But I thought about it again and realized that the closest I had ever come to seeing a cobra in Egypt was doing the cobra pose in yoga in a vain effort to straighten out my back after a long night atop my unfriendly mattress.  No, there was most certainly not an enormous cobra outside my window.  What was that sound then?  A battery-operated chainsaw?  An electric toothbrush?  There are so many babies in Egypt that for a moment I thought that perhaps it was a baby wailing, wanting milk, wanting more attention than his five baby brothers.  At 5:00 a.m., I suppose any baby who has not yet gone to bed (since children in Egypt have no bedtime and frequently stay up til all hours of the morning) would certainly be at least a bit cranky.  But this would have to be one cranky baby.  Pity the mother.  Yet, this sound, somewhere between a swooshing and a gushing and a pounding, did not sound human.  Nor did it sound mechanic.  What in the name of whichever God you pray to in Egypt could it be?  And then a twang (or was it a twinge?) of nostalgia waltzed up my spine and ended in a smile on my sleepy face.  Could it be rain?!?  I leapt up and stumbled glasses-less through the dark to the patio where I stood for a moment (but only a moment, for already it was passing) beneath the beautiful, heavenly falling of the rain.