And the Rains Came....

Preface...

I have been telling the story of how we got to our home and living in Panama in delayed time, we arrived here a few months ago and amidst travel, adaptation and a great many renovations, I wasn't able to find the time (and mental head space) to write about our daily adventures. I made lots of notes and many photos that I have been drawing upon to write the last few sections of our story.

I am going to join the present now and tell the story of our being here in this incredibly fluid and dynamic time, I would like to share the Panama perspective and how life feels in Panama right now.

I will continue to flash back to some milestones along the road here in Panama leading up to the present this, our present point.

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Well the rains came, and it was like waking up to a completely different world, yet again.

We hadn't woken up to rain here in Panama in 5 months, the last time this happened was actually November 10, 2019. I had marked this special day in my notes because it was so unusual, to wake up to rain and have it all day. When it happened in November; we had just had our new kitchen cabinets installed and needed a full day to move in and organize, so the rainy day was welcome.

Today, we emerged onto our back deck, as we always do to enjoy our coffee. and the light was different (very low), the birds were so vocal, there were flies and bugs out (which are rare in the morning) and the quiet, the pervasive quiet that has persisted all weekend. I found it so hard to concentrate on anything else, I just watched / stared at this new world, almost afraid to look away, fearful perhaps that something big was about to happen and I was going to miss it.

It is hard to know whether this pause, this dramatic shift in mood was simply caused by the rain, or by this ongoing feeling that the world is fundamentally shifting under the weight of this virus; I am sure it is a combination of both things. We had just gone through two days of a total national quarantine here in Panama; the streets were/ are silent, there was no music anywhere, there was an oppressive silence here all of Easter weekend. So after this eerily quiet Easter weekend of "no movement" waking to this "changed world" was further unsettling.

But, I think most of us have heard more than enough about the Covid outbreak each day, perhaps more than we can take. So today, I’d like to talk about something else, how about some of the unique features of Panama and the climate here rather than the Covid, we can talk more about that next time.

Panama, a country at the very bottom of Central America lies between 7 and 10 degrees north of the equator. As such its daily temperatures and hours of sunlight are fairly consistent year round, the sun rises between 6:00 and 6:30 am and sets between 6:00 and 6:30 pm throughout the year. One of the unique things here is the orientation of the country; Panama is an isthmus, measuring typically less than 50 miles across from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean, but its unique east-west orientation means (unlike the Americas) the Pacific Ocean forms the southern border or the country and the Caribbean Sea sits on the northern edge of the country. With these two coasts and a string of mountains along its continental divide, Panama is known for a variety of micro-climates , winds and rainfall can vary greatly over very small neighboring areas.

So if you rise with the emergence of sunlight as we often do, you get to watch the trees and horizon blossom in the beautiful sun and watch the incredible blue hues of the sky shift as the sun grows higher in the sky. You can do this in shorts every day; typically the temperatures never drop below 25C at night, so it is always comfortable and pleasant to be outside in the morning.

Panama, unlike the Americas really only has two seasons, the wet "winter" (Invierno en espanol) season and the dry "summer" (verano) season. Summer usually starts in December and runs through April. The Caribbean coast of Panama can typically see over 125 inches of rain per year, nearly double that of the Pacific Coast, and parts of the pacific coast like Coronado where we live will have much less than the Pacific Coast average. Though major storms will occur and there are regions that will experience flooding, Panama is southwest of the hurricane belt and does not experience any of the tropical cyclones.

We had arrived here in Panama last October and lived through the last few months of "winter". Our experience was the typical Panamanian winter experience, the mornings are almost always sunny, clouds visibly form up in the mountains through the middle of the day and it is possible to get an hour or two of rain in the afternoon. (In Coronado it would be more typical to see 30 minutes of rain in a day.) However, once summer arrived in late December last year, the winds picked up and the skies stayed blue; Coronado didn't see any measurable rain from December 28th through this very morning.

So, it was with some amazement and wonder I sat on my deck this morning looking at the "new world" around me, it seemed so foreign to me, all my senses said that my world had changed.

I made it into my office through the drizzle and as I sat to work on a few projects through the morning, I was distracted as the rain started to pound around our property, our pool filled to the point of overflowing by lunchtime, puddles filled our lawn, torrents of rain poured from the rooftops, it was wild, and it just didn't let up.

By noon as I walked out to start to drain the pool, I was at some points ankle deep in water, and the weight of this new world started to really sink in, I really wasn’t sure what was happening today.

We hunkered down for the afternoon and like so many were doing around the world at that very moment I am sure, we watched some Netflix for an escape. However, after a couple of episodes of the show we were watching, we started to see the skies brightening. As we turned off the TV around 3:00 we were amazed to look out and see the swamp that was our lawn a few hours ago had dried up, our pool deck was dry, it was amazing. We walked out into the hot Panama sun and the humidity was incredible, the sun was driving all of this torrents of moisture into the air.

We decided to celebrate this beautiful end of the afternoon by walking the dog and going for a short run (although not technically legal in our quarantine) and then returning to our beautiful pool deck for a swim and an afternoon cocktail.

Apparently, we had received over 5" of rain on this day, wow, winter had arrived like a lion.

As we sat in the sun, and dried off after our swim, the world seemed right again, we put some music on and sighed... it was good to be home!

Maybe tomorrow we can talk about the Virus and how Panama has been dealing with this.