It had been coming all day, the Melbourne humidity so thick it demanded to be licked and tasted and gorged on like ice cream, so thick. Would it come as one of those manic afternoon sweeps, the sky becoming an obtuse grey, the clouds gathering like formula one racers at the start of the race, motors revving at 18,000. Yes, 18,000 RPM clouds. The streets beg for rain, the houses without air-conditioning sign petitions for mercy, for a break. As if someone had been using an angle grinder while you’re trying to sleep it’s been a heavy dose. Building and building like the payoff in an Agatha Christie novel. Inevitable…….. and then the first peel laughs from the sky, and then another. The sky takes up the mat of the earth and shakes it with deep bassy resonances. 

You smell the rain before you see it or feel it, It comes sneaking over the barricades, out of the trenches of long held heat, of claustrophobic spaces suffocating in the crush of the humidity. As if someone had dropped a guillotine, the temperature is ten, no fifteen degrees cooler and the angry sky starts to cry and complain, a few drops ring on the tin, then someone turns on the exponential curve and they shoot like machine gun rounds until you look outside to see a glorious sheet of water echoing out from the sky, the streets shine wet, steam sending exhausted gasps from the wet pavements and tarmac, and that smell of the sea in the air, that’s where it’s come form. The great Southern deep, and the tarmac and the sidewalks all give up their secrets,  the smell memory of weeks of unrelenting time without a parching drop of the clear stuff. The roof becomes a racket, the street a river. Passers by unprepared  have clothes sticking to them like a second skin, other clever dicks have umbrellas, but in this  shout from the sky they’re almost ineffectual. Cars wash by, their tyres hissing on the wet road. I lever open the window a little more to sense the full effect of the cleansing rain.