Rain on Me
It’s raining in Daejeon today. The kind of rain you know will last all day. During the rainy season in Korea— 장마 , changma —the rains settle in for weeks at a time, hanging over the peninsula. The air turns heavy, the sky lowers, and the days take on a slower rhythm, as if everything is waiting for the rain to pass. One thing I’ve learned about the rain in Korea is that it has a personality. Sometimes it comes in steady, quiet sheets, soft enough that you don’t notice it at first until the streets begin to shine and the sidewalks darken. Other times it arrives sideways, pushed by gusts of wind rushing down from the hills, umbrellas tilting and bending as people lean into it and keep moving. It lingers. It fades. It returns. You begin to feel as though it’s not just weather, but something moving through the day with its own mood. And whenever it rains like this, I sometimes think about a very different kind of rain. B ack when I was stationed at Howard Air Force Base ...
