The sound of rain on concrete is unlike any other sound.
That’s not to say it’s a particularly lovely sound. It’s no better nor worse than rain on a tin roof in a warmish part of the world. It’s certainly much worse than the sound of rain on leaves or on a grassy field.
Rain on concrete is a rain of urine. It collects in gutters and alleys, dripping splat splat from awnings and forming slick rivers to rain again to the sewers below.
Rain on concrete is ugly. There’s beauty on a rainy night, but it’s all indoors. It’s the hot tea sipped while wrapped in a warm blanket. It’s the view out the window, where the streaks and rivulets on the pane blur and bend the view outside. It’s the exhilarating crawl up the back as a scraping branch turns your place into an Agatha Christie, just for a moment. It’s making love as it thunders outside.
Outdoors, it’s just piss, soaked pant cuffs and an occasional thunderclap so loud it sets off car alarms. It’s nonending spatter punctuated by thundercloud groans. It’s a homeless man on Greenview rushing a shopping cart filled with a sicker homeless man to any place that might blot the rain just for a second.
“Oye! Oye! Oye!” the man folded in the cart yelled as he pointed his friend to a likely looking spot. “Oye.”
His friend pushes on. The rain keeps falling.
