We had a bit of rain last night.

Yes, only a bit.

As Mark and I were sitting on the veranda watching the sunset, talking over the events of the day while dinner simmered and the kids climbed over both of us, a rather heavy rain began to fall ... but only on one end of the veranda. The other end, all of five meters away, had no rain at all.

The microclimates we have here used to amaze me, but now only amuse and reinforce my affection for life on a tropical island. Not only can I see rain coming ... a smearing of gray shifting over the open sea heading my way ... I can smell its approach, hear it gather momentum, and occasionally stand just to the left of it.

Our storms can be ferocious, and although Seychelles sits too near the Equator for cyclones (every so thankfully), we get the tails from time to time. These can cause a lot of damage, and when houses slide off hills, or hills onto houses, people do suffer. Most of the time, however, rains are manageable and appreciated. Like Kermit the Frog finally ends up admitting, being green can be nice, and Seychelles is covered in a whole lot of green stuff.

What's not green, and not beach, tends on the main islands to be red. We have really old dirt ... too old for fossils, even ... some of the oldest on the planet, and the decomposing of the granite that we're made of makes for later rouze, red soil. These inner islands, called The Mahe Group, are the vestigial remnants of the ancient super-continent that eventually broke up into Africa, Madagascar, Asia and Australia and drifted into their present positions. We're the part still sticking up that didn't move.

Being over 1000 miles from any large landmass, the closest being the eastern coast of Africa, and being very small (Mahe, the biggest island is four miles wide and seventeen miles long.), you'd think that weather sweeping across the vastness of the Indian Ocean would come and go without noticing us much. Not so, however.

I live in the south of Mahe on the west coast at a beach called Anse Soleil. Twenty minutes drive up the same coast will get you to Anse Boileau ... which gets not just a little more, but twice as much rain in a year as we have. Hop over to the other side of the island and find Cascade, the wettest place around where it seems to be raining almost every time I drive to town.

The drive to town, all of twelve kilometers, can take me through many weather situations, from sunny and hot, to blustery, to big-fat-fall-straight-down-like-from-a-bucket rain, to sideways-coconut tree wind, all the way back to sunny.

Sometimes the weather follows the car, like I'm in a cartoon driving with a cloud just over me. I can see it's not raining ahead of me or behind me, but I've got the wipers on full blast just to keep pace with the torrent focused a meter above my steering wheel.

Ahhh. Island life.