For forty-three years, Emil Brunner did the same thing every morning at exactly seven o’clock. He walked out of his chalet in Grindelwald, crossed the wet grass in his rubber boots, and emptied a small copper cylinder into a graduated glass tube.
"Averages don't keep you company," he said finally. "But the rain does. Every drop has a number. Every number has a story. In Switzerland, we don't just have rainfall. We have a conversation with the sky. I just write down what it says." average rainfall in switzerland
He recorded the number in a blue notebook. Then he drank his coffee and watched the clouds snag on the Eiger’s north face like wool on a nail. For forty-three years, Emil Brunner did the same
And the average rainfall in Switzerland, that elegant lie, ticked upward by a fraction of a millimeter. "But the rain does
Emil thought of the morning his wife died. He had still gone outside at seven, emptied the copper cylinder, recorded 12.7 millimeters. He thought of the summer he lost his barn to a mudslide—the rain gauge had read 89 millimeters in twenty-four hours. The ground had simply given up.