Bush, Catherine. “Rain, Carson, Art, Salt: A Venetian Matrix.” Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, no. 7 (May 2025).
Early September 2024: When, on the morning of my third day in Venice, I wake and grab my phone to check the weather app, I am met by the same orange band of trouble as the night before. There are severe thunderstorm and rainfall warnings for the entire Veneto region. Up to 86 millimetres of potential rainfall. I lie in bed in the small ground-floor apartment that I’ve rented not far from the Arsenale and the Giardini, sites of the Venice Biennale. I’m here to see art but am distracted by the weather. The air conditioner grinds away, the air thick with heat and humidity, the smell of the room touched with sulphur. The windows, shrouded by curtains, don’t open. I think of the flash floods that recently hit my home city of Toronto, submerging highways; the flash floods in Montréal that inundated neighbourhoods, including a friend’s basement; the flash floods in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where my sister lives, which swept away my niece’s teenaged neighbour, drowning him. There were spring floods in Bavaria, where I have lived for six months, rising river waters overtaking Regensburg. In July, torrential rainfall in Kerala brought on massive landslides. (From the article)
This article was originally published in Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review. Springs is an online publication featuring peer-reviewed articles, creative nonfiction, and artistic contributions that showcase the work of the Rachel Carson Center and its community across the world.
2025 Catherine Bush
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