Water from another place

For Fun by Kitano Tsunetomi, 1929

 Jenny Odell. How do Do Nothing. p. 149

The borders of bioregions are not only impossible to define; they are permeable. I learned this most of all last March, when I idly noticed an article on the front page of a local newspaper about an "atmospheric river" that would be arriving from the Philippines. I had never heard the term, and when I looked it up, I learned that atmospheric rivers are temporary narrwo regions in the atmosphere that transport moisture from the tropics, in this case to the West Coast (the most well-known being the Pineapple Express). As the river makes landfall, its water vapor cools and falls in the form of rain. Atmospheric rivers are hundreds of miles wide and can carry many times the amount of water as the Mississip River. I was surprised to find that California gets 30-50 percent of its rainfall from atmospheric river events.

This was all very interesting, but it pointed toward something even more obvious that I hadn't been paying attention to. I had never really thought about where rain comes from, other than the sky. Or more precisely, where my rain comes from. I suppose if you had asked me, and I'd considered it for a moment, I could have told you that rain comes from somewhere else, but I wouldn't have been able to say where precisely, how, and in what shape.  Reading the article, I couldn't put out of my mind the idea that the coming rain had just been in a country where half my family was from, a place I had never been.  Wanting to see if more closely, I put out a large jar in the alley behind my apartment building. (And I learned something else: it takes a really long time to collect even a small amount of rainwater, even when it seems to be raining really hard.) I used some of the water with drugstore watercolors to paint a picture of a sampaguita, the national flower of the Philippines, and gave it to my mom.  The rest sits on my desk in a small jar: water from another place.