Thursday

Recently, I've stooped to bemoaning the rising humidity without a hope of rain. Really, over the last few weeks, the southern Vietnamese climate has almost equaled that of my home state at its worst. Just last Monday I said (among other things*), that while traveling to the US, I'd "also miss the beginning of this year's rainy season, slated for May...". And when I went to bed last night, that was still true: the moon rose above a clear evening with stars and some little cotton puffs of clouds wandering lazily like the plump sheep of heaven. I woke up today to thunder and lightning. I rushed to the balcony to look out over one of the more Armageddon-like days I've seen: the sky was high and gray, and the atmosphere was somehow yellowish and violently still. Isolated rushes of wind were coming, however, blasting into the park trees from the south, a kinetic shock I could follow through the grove until it came out across the street from me as a fan of gumball-sized, rabbit-eared seedpods that fanned out over the block and then slowly helicoptered into the heavy traffic below. Soon enough it was raining brutal, giant drops that seemed to swirl around our building, first visible through one window, then later through another. Then it began to rain in earnest, and did so for about forty minutes. When it was finally done raining it remained gray under an endlessly moving sky, swift and seemingly permanent. Was this the beginning of the rainy season? It just seemed too dramatic, too apples-and-oranges different from yesterday's season. Long after dark, we returned from a nice Indian dinner at Ashoka. The lightning was still at it, zapping eastern Hồ Chí Minh City silently, consistently, flashing streets strewn with seeds. [Cavin]