Forecast: Floods
This is getting ridiculous. It has come to the point of keeping a lookout for the mailman so I can collect the letters from the mailbox before they become a sopping mass of wet paper and colored ink. Mopping becomes an all-day event. I mop but it doesn't dry, even after passing newspaper over the area. Clothes can only dry at the stove, slowly, piece by piece. Which leaves the kitchen looking like a laundry most of the week. I'd almost forgotten what a partly sunny day looked like until today that the rain decided to give it a rest.
Unfortunately, tomorrow another front will waltz through the region, setting off alarms and swelling swollen rivers just a little bit more. A high pressure area is supposed to come in at the end of the week, but more rain on Sunday. And on it goes. Yes, Galicia is the land of rain. Yes, rain is what makes this land so green. But 257 liters per square meter in just three days is a little too much. That is the amount of water that fell in Cuntis between Wednesday and Friday last week. That's the amount that normally falls during the entire month of January. In some places more rain has fallen in these first days of January than in the past November and December combined. Rivers and streams have entered houses and created enormous lakes on roads. Schools and other public buildings have been buying pails to catch the rain that made its way in through the roof. Angry people bailing out businesses and cellars complain that the government doesn't let anyone clean out underbrush along the riverbanks, narrowing the rivers and making flooding inevitable. And, truth be said, it always seems that local and regional government agencies are never ready for an excess of water, despite this region's meteorological history.
We're used to water, though. In fact, it has been calculated that there are more than seventy words that refer to rain in Galego. From borraxeira, chuviscada, poallada, chaparrada, treixada, trebón, and sarabiada, to amizar, escampar and estiñar. Including chover (llover, to rain). A professor of Romance languages at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Elvira Fidalgo, actually wrote her doctoral thesis on the many words for rain. It's called La Metáfora en las Designaciones de la Lluvia. In it you can find all the different words referring to rain and their origins. Many of the stranger words are truly metaphorical and makes one envious of how our ancestors could play with words and images. For example, froallo comes from floccum, from which our flock comes, such as flock of hair. Floccum means strand. Froallo describes a thin type of mist that resembled tiny hairs of wool flying in the air when a sheep was sheared. Speakers of the vulgar Latin that was to become Galego used descriptions of events they experienced regularly to describe something else entirely different, in this case rain. How much imagination we have lost!
I see a shower on the horizon headed this way. I had better go make sure everything is under cover.
Unfortunately, tomorrow another front will waltz through the region, setting off alarms and swelling swollen rivers just a little bit more. A high pressure area is supposed to come in at the end of the week, but more rain on Sunday. And on it goes. Yes, Galicia is the land of rain. Yes, rain is what makes this land so green. But 257 liters per square meter in just three days is a little too much. That is the amount of water that fell in Cuntis between Wednesday and Friday last week. That's the amount that normally falls during the entire month of January. In some places more rain has fallen in these first days of January than in the past November and December combined. Rivers and streams have entered houses and created enormous lakes on roads. Schools and other public buildings have been buying pails to catch the rain that made its way in through the roof. Angry people bailing out businesses and cellars complain that the government doesn't let anyone clean out underbrush along the riverbanks, narrowing the rivers and making flooding inevitable. And, truth be said, it always seems that local and regional government agencies are never ready for an excess of water, despite this region's meteorological history.
We're used to water, though. In fact, it has been calculated that there are more than seventy words that refer to rain in Galego. From borraxeira, chuviscada, poallada, chaparrada, treixada, trebón, and sarabiada, to amizar, escampar and estiñar. Including chover (llover, to rain). A professor of Romance languages at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Elvira Fidalgo, actually wrote her doctoral thesis on the many words for rain. It's called La Metáfora en las Designaciones de la Lluvia. In it you can find all the different words referring to rain and their origins. Many of the stranger words are truly metaphorical and makes one envious of how our ancestors could play with words and images. For example, froallo comes from floccum, from which our flock comes, such as flock of hair. Floccum means strand. Froallo describes a thin type of mist that resembled tiny hairs of wool flying in the air when a sheep was sheared. Speakers of the vulgar Latin that was to become Galego used descriptions of events they experienced regularly to describe something else entirely different, in this case rain. How much imagination we have lost!
I see a shower on the horizon headed this way. I had better go make sure everything is under cover.
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