The year that is

Six days into the new year and we have yet to see the sun. With the change in the calendar, the intermittent showers of Christmas had finally developed into a steady rain. Stay in, it said. Stay put.

And so I did. One doesn’t argue with nature and I had a hangover to deal with. I slept, snuggled with the dogs, watched marathon reruns on Fox, slept some more. In between, I raided the refrigerator (lots of leftovers), made trips to the bathroom (but never once to wash my face or take a bath, ha-ha!), and stole glances at the Facebook notification tray. It was a cold and lazy day. The rain even stopped sometime around midnight to allow me to go out and get tanked up again. Who needs an excuse to pickle your liver on the new year?

Like I said, you don’t argue with nature. There’s one fairly simple reason for this: you can’t. The rain came back the next day. It was torrential. I found Ma furiously scanning the news channels. “There must be a storm coming,” she said. There wasn’t. It was just rain — lots of it. By the next day, reports of a landslide in the town of Saint Bernard (on the Pacific side of the province, where a similar event killed over a thousand people in 2006) and massive flooding in Lanao del Norte, Butuan, Albay, and as far away as Queensland. Now she was really worried. “Is that near your sister’s?” I Googled a map of Australia. Not even close; it was on the other end of the continent.

Welcome to the year that is. Isn’t it terribly familiar? Rain falls, rivers rise, cities drown, and elsewhere, life goes on — albeit with colder nights. The sun will rise again tomorrow; maybe we’ll see it, maybe we won’t. Not one to argue, I count days.

Happy new year.

Photo: The Solar Ninja