Observer file photo It wouldn´t seem like winter here in Pacific County without puddles and splashing raindrops.

On Nov. 9, 1912, my Aunt Medora wrote to her mother: It has been raining here for almost ten days steady; that umbrella comes in handy. There has been no wind at all with the rain — just rain, rain. I wish I were home so as to enjoy the high tides and storms. I have not minded the rain here so far at all. I think when people complain of the weather they just have nothing to say and want to say something…

Medora was 13 and was a sophomore at the Portland Academy when she came to this rather wise observation (or so I’ve always thought) concerning people and their litany of weather grievances. I’ve wondered more than once what she would think of today’s endless forecasts on the television news. And what would she make of our ongoing dialogue about climate change and global warming? Would she have maintained her cheerful attitude?

I’ll never know, of course. Medora died in her sleep (a cerebral hemorrhage, it was said) on Jan. 18, 1916. She didn’t live to see television or even to hear the radio and I doubt if the terms “Doppler Effect” or “Greenhouse Gas” would have any meaning for her. Not by a long shot. In fact, it would be more than 20 years after her death before electricity arrived in Oysterville bringing with it more discussion of weather than she could have imagined.

The other Oysterville resident who I connect with weather, especially rain, is old Jimmy Anderson. He lived in a shack near the bay about a mile south of town and walked to the store every few days to get a “fresh” can of milk and would check in at the post office though he got only one letter a month — a check from the government, I think. I remember him as a gentle old man, quite shy but, when asked, he always had a prediction about the weather.

He would look to the west, study the sky for a minute or so and then, having given the matter some thought would say, “Looks like rain.” Or if it was already raining, his response would be, “Going to clear soon.” His predictions were seldom wrong.

Jimmy was one of Oysterville’s true “characters.” The 1920 census listed him as 49 years of age and living with his mother, Emma. After she died in 1931, Jimmy continued to live alone in their little shack with his many cats.

Jimmy played the violin. In Marie Oesting’s book, “Oysterville Cemetery Sketches,” Helen Heckes said he played it “after a fashion” but Edith Olson, herself a violinist, said “he played it beautifully.” People whispered that it was a Stradivarius. (It wasn’t.) Johnny Holway and I and some of the other Oysterville kids used to ride our bikes down Jimmy’s road on summer evenings and lurk around outside his place hoping to hear him… but we never did.

For years Jimmy wore the same threadbare overcoat, and the village women grew concerned. One Christmas they made him a present of a warm blanket and a new raincoat, but time went by and he still wore his old coat. Finally, one of the women asked and he said in his distinctive, soft spoken way, “You know, I have that blanket all wrapped up in the raincoat so it won’t get moldy or anything.”

Jimmy had a heart attack standing at his sink and died there, propped up by his elbows. We were going through a rainy spell, so it was a few days before anyone realized they hadn’t seen him for a while. By the time he was found, the brambles had already grown through the open window and were twining round his arms. Somehow, I don’t think Jimmy would have minded.

From exploration and discovery onward, of course, everyone has remarked about our rainy weather. For 18 days in November 1805, stormy weather kept the Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery virtually trapped along the north shore of the Columbia within sight of the Pacific Ocean. Day after day they recorded in their journals some rain or rained hard or sometimes rained verry [sic] hard or rained with great violence.

A half-century later, James G. Swan built a cedar cabin and set up housekeeping on the Querquelin or Mouse River on Shoalwater Bay. From 1852 to 1855 he lived among the Chinooks and early Euro-American settlers and, fortunately for those of us who followed, meticulously recorded what he experienced and observed for his book, “The Northwest Coast or Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory.”

He had a great deal to say about rain: …The October ushers in the south wind and the rain, both of which continue without intermission till January, when the wind begins to bear to the westward; but the rain seldom ceases till the termination of April.

Swan went on to say: From the high latitude of Shoal-water Bay, the days are very short, and but little out-door work can be done, and the settler finds it a difficult task to pass off the long, stormy nights, unless with the aid of books or some useful in-door employment. Some things don’t change!

My all-time favorite James Swan story also has to do with rain. It seems that one Fourth of July the “oyster boys” as he called his neighboring settlers, rounded out their celebration by stuffing a huge hollow cedar stump with dried spruce limbs which, he said, were lying about in great quantities, and then set fire to the whole. It made the best bonfire I ever saw; and after burning all night and part of the next day, finally set fire to the forest, which continued to burn for several months, till the winter rains finally extinguished it. The party broke up at an early hour, and all declared that, with the exception of the absence of a cannon, they never had a pleasanter “fourth.”

Of our rain here at the beach, my uncle Willard Espy wrote in Oysterville, Roads to Grandpa’s Village: In an ordinary year, a hundred inches of rain fall on grandpa’s village; we have mutated until we breathe with comfort air that is half water, or water that is half air. I suspect that if the Peninsula were to sink beneath our feet, a mishap that in some downpours seems imminent, we could live submerged without serious inconvenience.

I think both Medora and Jimmy would have agreed. Probably James Swan, too, but I’m not so sure about Lewis and Clark. I don’t think they were filled with much whimsical feeling about our rainy weather.

Sydney Stevens lives and writes in her family’s ancestral home in Oysterville.