The most valuable lesson we learned during language classes may yet prove to be the idiomatic French expression, Il 
pleut comme vache qui pisse.
No, the French don’t rain cats and dogs. Their version is, “It’s raining like a pissing cow.”
Forgive the image, but I speak with some authority that it is absolutely accurate. My job one miserable winter as a high school junior in Vermont was to clean the cow gutters in the Putney School barn every morning at 5 a.m. I carried the weighty title of “barn crew chief,” which simply meant I had to show up.
So I know for a fact that cows pee with considerable force. Or, as the French would say, they pour. And this winter that description has applied to the rainfall in Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere in the South of France with alarming frequency. Last night we saw on the news that Nice, on the French Riviera two hours from here, has had four times the normal rainfall. After a storm two weeks ago, the mayor of Hyeres said his city just 65 miles from Aix had suffered “a historic flood,” wire services reported.
The average January rainfall in Aix-en-Provence is 2 inches. My 10 minutes of exhaustive research has not turned up an actual figure for this January (although I did discover that I can take courses at “Rain Bird” Academy on irrigation to sharpen my expertise).
Nonetheless, I can tell you with certainty that it has rained a lot. And it continues to do just that. Today, Feb. 5, it’s pouring. Next week, when we had hoped to venture out on a series of back-road adventures, the forecast is for four days of weekday rain out of five. And this in a region and city that boasts of 300 days of sunshine each year, a boast of perennial sunshine that has held up on our previous three visits.
Whatever the cause, this is one strange winter across the globe, whether you’re watching the parched forests and bare slopes in the western U.S., walking around in shirtsleeves in Alaska or freezing in the American South. The French Atlantic Coast has been battered by several bad storms in a single month, and there have been landslides along the south coast of the Mediterranean.
To me the rain is but a minor inconvenience, one small part, after our intensive French classes, of a bumpy transitional week that’s included family issues an ocean away, a bad bout of coughing, and difficult decisions about how much more time and money to invest in improving my still somewhat shabby French.
Whatever my decision, this I can promise: I will carry home one vivid French expression for rainy days firmly imprinted on my brain.
While living in the French countryside outside of Geneva, I was tutoring a 22 year old young man and his mother in English. We met separately. David and I were working on idioms and he taught me this phrase. When I repeated it with great delight the next day to his mother, she was appalled. “Where did you hear THAT?” She was embarrassed that David had told me, but I was so thrilled to be able to use the language that REAL French people use! I’ve never gotten over the very vivid mental image this phrase brings!
Lovely little story. Thanks for sharing it. I don’t actually think it was part of our official curriculum either!
I guess that the more acceptable expression is : “Il pleut des cordes” (It’s raining ropes). Love learning the new expression!
Thanks for il pleut des cordes. New to me!