The rain has returned. Outside my window it falls and falls. Gentle, soaking rain. The new green grass (so recently returned) soaks it in. Plants seem to regenerate right there in front of me.

Rain means so many different things to different people. It has taken these few months since my return to love rain again. In Korea, particularly in Daegu, it rains all the time, especially in summer. Rain becomes an annoying, ordinary part of every day. It is something you complain about but also an inevitability around which you organise your life. I took to carrying an umbrella in my handbag or my daypack at all times. Constant, pouring rain becomes the norm.

And you adapt. You adapt so quickly. I suppose because it is a foreign country and you are primed for everything to be new and strange, you accept it all wholesale. Which is not to say it is fun, but you simply never question the idea of everyday, pouring rain.

Coming home, it took longer to revert back to the way it used to be. It took a while to accept the winter-dry landscape with brittle grass and grey thorn-trees as ‘the way things are’. After the overwhelmingly (almost kitsch-ly) always-green-except-when-Christmas-card-white Korean countryside, it seemed barren and lifeless. At the same time, on another level, my heart burst with joy at the space and freedom and realness – as if that much green and that much water couldn’t be real. It took a long time to bring these contradictory reactions into balance and finally open up the space to rediscover the special relationship I’ve always had with the African sky and the blood-red soil and the rain.

Even between Eastern and Western Cape, rain has different meanings. In the dryer parts of the country, the places subject to droughts, the places where people survive on the back of a good harvest or animals not starving in the dry, you learn to love the rain. You learn to long for the metallic taste in the air as a thunderstorm builds and the hard, firm rain-drops on your skin. You learn to wait for the first flashes of lightning and anticipate the rolling thunder. You learn to watch weather forecasts more closely. Stutt is a forestry area and has, as well as the glorious thunderstorms, gentler, slower rains. The rain that falls, softly-softly, for days on end and leaves the soil soggy for days more.

The garden is full of birds this morning, in a brief break between showers. They flit back and forth and hop between branches, chattering and singing and filling the world with a sweet celebration of the rain finally returning the life to the parched land.