"It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains." This is the first sentence from "The Long Rain" a sci-fi short story by Ray Bradbury, published in "The Illustrated Man" that chronicles an indeterminate period of time after four men have crash landed their space ship on Venus. They are trying to reach the safety of the 'Sun Domes' to escape the planet's constant, unrelenting rain. Three men die: one from a lightening strike, one is murdered, and one commits suicide. The lone survivor finds safety, warmth, and dry clothes in what he believes is 'the dome'. But he may simply be hallucinating...
We are having a version of "The Long Rain" after "The Long Drought" where I live in MS. We tried to see the advantages to having so much rain after not having any for such a long time. We were looking forward to smaller water bills, greener, healthier plants and lawns, having hose and sprinklers as decoration instead of necessities. Now, after almost 2 months of drenching downpours, in record amounts, we are measuring the diameter of mushrooms in our yard compared with those of our neighbors. So far the winner is four inches wide from a yard two streets over. Our next door neighbor's two outside dogs have matching coats of Yazoo mud and my backyard has become a swimming pool.
The only thing worse than this 'long rain' would be a long hot, dry summer with little or no relief from triple digit temps and near 100 percent humidity. Wishing for a hurricane to hit the MS coast and deliver a change to our weather here can't be a good way to cool down from June through September. Having to stay indoors because of too much rain or too much sun sucks. If there isn't anything we can do about the weather, we will have to learn how to adapt and live with it, (like Sun Domes). Science fiction writers just might be our go to sources for answers about how we can adjust our living environment to cope with the extreme weather to come. My preference is a rubber house (with flotation properties) that has a 'sun' room equipped with banks of UV lighting where plants AND humans might spend some quality time. There I could write a sequel titled "The Long Rain-Earth".
