We have definitely been experiencing April showers around here. It’s been exciting seeing all of the plants start popping up, finally believing that SPRING IS HERE!
I mostly think of rainy days as being rather dreary (though I enjoy the dreariness very much, especially when I’m inside and can hear the raindrops falling on the tin roof of our barn). But I remember one time in Alaska (it was mid-summer) I had the amazing experience of standing on the beach up to my elbows in fish slime (as one does when one is a commercial salmon fisherman in Alaska) being in a sunshower. A sunshower is when it is raining but the sun is also shining brightly at the same time. It was amazing – each raindrop was lit up by the sun and it looked like diamonds were falling from the sky.
I searched high and low for a video that might capture it, but the closest I came was this one:
It’s much cooler when you can stand in it and look up at the drops falling down on you (a friend who has experimented with trippy things said that if you take a shower with a strobe light on it has a similar effect, but that’s definitely something to set up with adult supervision).
I learned that across the globe, there is a lot of folklore related to sunshowers. In many countries, it has something to do with weddings:
- In Algeria, Bangladesh, France, Portugal, Japan, Morocco, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and various parts of India they say it’s a fox’s or wolf’s wedding when there’s a sunshower.
- In Bulgaria, it’s bears getting married.
- In Greece, it’s the poor getting married.
- In Kenya, hyenas are getting married.
- In Korea, it’s a male tiger getting married to a fox.
- In northern Iran, it’s a jackal getting married.
- In parts of Pakistan, it’s a one-eyed jackal’s wedding (to get even more specific)
- In South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago it’s monkeys getting married
- In Sudan, it’s a donkey getting married to a monkey
In other countries, it has to do with witches:
- In Catalonia (part of Spain) it’s witches brushing their hair
- In Poland, it’s a witch making butter
- In Puerto Rico and The Dominican Republic, it’s a witch getting married
And so I wonder who was getting married, making butter, or brushing their hair in Alaska on that day when I was in a sunshower. I hope it was a monkey getting married to a donkey, because, well, wouldn’t their babies be adorable?
