I think how one feels about rain has a lot to do with how much rain one is used to getting. When I lived in the NE I would sometimes wish for rain for the garden, but I rarely enjoyed it. A place that got 40 inches of rain per year, simply made rain feel too common.
Here we average 20 inches of precipitation per year. My guess is that 1/3 of that falls during two or three snowstorms per year. The snow sticks to the ponderosa pines and everything is beautiful. The rest falls in brief rain showers scattered throughout the year. It is usually true that when it rains we have had long stretches of sunny weather and the ground is dry. Rain is almost always welcome here.
I wasn't living here for very long when I went into a restaurant and the waitress asked how I was doing. "Good." I said. "But I wish it weren't raining."
"I like rainy days," she replied sweetly.
Suddenly I realized I wasn't living in NJ anymore. Firstly, there nobody does anything sweetly. Secondly, service people may be surly, but they tend not to contradict you without reason. But most importantly, I realized that here rain was really precious. And it does have a peculiar beauty of its own here.
Last year DW and I went out of town for two weeks. We had someone water the garden daily. He was very careful, and judging from our water bill he used about twice as much water as I usually did. I would have been able to tell anyways because it was filled with the lushest stand of weeds I've seen here.
That may have done the garden more good than I credited it at the time. I lost very few roses over winter this year. I think dry spells that last two or three months in summer can really set back roses that are not well established, which means they are not in a good place when frost strikes in fall. I think that may be one contributing factor to my difficulty with roses here. Probably in NJ, too, where roses got the double whammy of dry soil and humid air in July. Also, I keep being surprised with how much more workable the soil around weeds is than the soil where they aren't growing. Not sure which is cause and which effect.
