On rainy days the city goes into a hushed trance. It’s as if everyone has recoiled from the bustling normality of their lives, dusted off the ol’ kierkegaard, and made a big pot of coffee for reflection. First thing in the morning, the difference is palpable; instead of jumping up and shouting “I’m here!  Blue sky!  Big sun!  Hear the gas truck? The tamale guy? The agua criers?” the day comes quietly, slipping in through the back door and then hovering palpably but reservedly in the background like a depressed houseguest.

Rainy days have a serious impact in places where 95% of the time the sky is the same knockout blue and the weather follows the predictable arc of crisp and cool to dry and hot to crisp and cool. People seem to have an unspoken, unconscious rainy day procedure as instinctual as the rote preparations behind a traditional holiday.  Maybe those Aztec and Zapotec rain dances have been trickling down through millennia.  Maybe reverence for rain resides in the marrow of Oaxaca’s people, so that when a rainy day comes it calls up a vaguely felt reflection on the norm, faint memories of dances and chanting and elaborately dressed Gods.

I took the dog for a run at 3 p.m and found hardly anyone on the streets. Not even moms herding their kids home from school and leaping in horror onto the shoulder of the street as I passed with Stella, not even university kids in their ratty converse hanging out on the steps. No one. Ok, well, one drunk guy weaving round the sidewalk who managed half a “guerrriiita” before I’d left him tottering, but there’s always a token one of those somewhere on the streets of Oaxaca at any hour. Was everyone thinking about past journeys and places and people in a tender, indulgent, melancholy light like I was? Were they all feeling that halcyon warmth that we like to think grandparents feel looking fondly out on the sea of their lives? Were they walking onto their balconies for a cigarette to look at the gathering clouds over Santo Domingo? Stopping to gaze out the window at the strange, troubled grayness? Or perhaps just avoiding wet feet and eating tortas inside, bitching about the weather?  Who knows. I’m going to go with the former.

So I went running and felt this manifest change in the air. Living in a place with such a consistent climate fine tunes you to the slightest changes in meteorological mood. It’d take the equivalent of a blizzard and the shutting down of the highways back home to force this kind of a mood change. But here, it’s a lot subtler, and that battleship sky of blues and grays is enough to ripple the collective consciousness.

Being a traveler, I of course jumped at the chance to do some unabashed nostalgia wallowing. I’ve always loved rainy days – I relished the month in Seattle in a constant state of caffeinated dampness – so ending up in Oaxaca’s endless blue cheer is an ironic twist for me. Still, it’s undeniably a good thing for you, reader, that I don’t have more nostalgia-wallowing opportunities, or you’d be stuck in an eternal bus ride across South America, discovering your independence and watching glaciers emerge royally from the pampas. As great as that is for one sentence, by the upteenth cup o’ coffee and a few more laps around nostalgia central, it gets mighty old. Even I know that, and I love nostalgia like a dear, slightly delusional relative.

So yes.  I am grateful for the mood switch and take advantage of it to peel my eyes away from the computer and look for a good hard while at the sky. It’s a Maine seashore, that sky, a rocky vastness onto which to cast your woes. Twitter twitter twitter, sky sky sky. So goes the day, with the sky winning out little by little. Finally I take the dogs for a walk at 4 and the sky has taken on my favorite nostalgic color – a soft, boiled egg yolk yellow nestled between blue and gray that for me always says “winter.” It is the color of that fading feeling, of endlessness and ends. I almost didn’t notice one dog pulling this way and the other that in an increasing intertwined leash disaster as I lost myself in that pale yellow.

By the time we were nearly home, the dogs in a foaming, oblivious-to-oceanic-skies-and-gentle-nostalgia panic to be fed, the sky had already begun to darken. Tomorrow, surely, it’ll be bouncy ball blue once more. And I’ll sit up straight and get back to work (with little soft strips of yellow still vaguely present in my mind, like the lingering memory of a kiss the morning after).