Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Of course, these days we cannot talk about rainfall without speaking of Global Warming, so I will quickly get to the point. I know nothing of global warming, I understand very little, and yet I believe that Global Warming is real. I know myself to be one of the ignorant people who simply chooses her beliefs according to the reality that she wants for the world, and so I think that my opinion should be discredited and never allowed to sway others. I am one of those people who makes Global Warming such a deeply contentious issue.

I know that it rains a lot. I think part of the reason for that is that I spent several years working in an office with no windows onto the outside world. It is a great privelege for me to now have my own window. My window comes also with a frangipani tree, and those frangipani flowers drop to the grass when the rain falls. I can also hear the rain, but I cannot be entirely sure when it ends sometimes, as it can be too light to see or hear, and I cannot tell if it is raining more than it did in the past. I just know that that doesn’t mean that it isn’t. And that my adoption of that phrase among others is what marks me as a Doctor of Philosophy and not Science.

Of course, for me it rains much more than it used to because I was in a location in which it did not rain for half of the year, preferring to snow. I was told the snow was less in quantity than the past. But I was told that by people who were recounting tales of their childhood. I think that people are not very good at keeping time, and knowing time, at recounting time.