It’s no secret that the late autumn rain is harder on people with disabilities just as it’s harder on the poor and homeless. In Heaven there will be no rain though the fruit trees will magically produce all the apples you want–with or without knowledge. Meantime it’s raining in Iowa and I must go out and stand a long time waiting for the bus, dog at my side, the two of us sagging like hanging laundry.
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The disabled body is a political body. The rain is apolitical. The bus and its infrequency is political rain. The anthropology of political rain is nigh. Or the rain, a co-determinate of global warming is thoroughly political. Oh how helpless we are before these forces! Look at Obama stumbling around on the issue of climate change. Meantime we hunch into our coats.
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This morning I’m thinking of the world’s poorest people, all of them in the rain and its not a rain of their own making.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Weather can be such a bummer. Thank goodness we have none of it in L.A. And, yes, those of us who ride around in our automobiles, only to occasionally brave the relatively unregulated environment of underground garages and supermarket parking lots got it easy. When I foolishly joined the National Guard at age 18, my term of service consisted of three, very long, very difficult weeks in January at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. One of my (many) gripes was the amount of time I was spending outdoors in inappropriate clothing. I still remember struggling amidst a heap of sopping wet women in a driving rain after a poorly executed command in our first drill & ceremony practice went tragically awry. In civilian life, though, my biggest problem last week was a chronically over-air-conditioned office. Whenever the temp outside is over 85 degrees, the downstairs people must exist in freezing temps so that the folks upstairs won’t become uncomfortably warm. I try to layer my clothing, but the tips of my fingers and nose are not happy.
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