September 29, 2023;
Forecast for Manhattan: Heavy rains all day
Friday night was the eighth full moon of the lunar year, the Mid-autumn Festival. It not only rained all day. It poured. New Yorkers were told to “shelter in place,” a familiar phrase that we had gotten used to hearing since COVID shutdown.
Luckily, I had no specific plans for the day and had plenty of supplies. So, I stayed in and worked on my projects while listening to the rain.
The rain was so heavy that I could hear it with all the windows shut. Then, there was the sound of water trickling down from the bathroom ceiling of my top-floor co-op apartment. The stubborn leaks had been there for weeks. The continuous precipitation only encouraged it to expand.
Part of me was concerned and frustrated. But a huge part of me was giggling inside. I was finishing up an essay on the collaboration between Zhao Yuanren and Liu Bannong and was planning on writing about their work “Listening to the Rain.” Surrounded by the sounds of rain, outdoors and indoors, I sat quietly, organizing my thoughts.
I would remember this particular Mid-autumn night for a very long time.