The day after any rain, between eight and nine in the morning, Colin Cusack steps out into his garden in the south of France to measure the rainfall in not one but two pluviometers. He records the results by hand in a palm-sized notebook, a ritual he has regularly performed for nearly 50 years.
“It’s a peasant’s habit”, Cusack says in French, standing in the sunlit and joyously cluttered dining room of his family home, dressed in an earth-covered blue coverall and well-worn leather boots. “You need to have an idea of how much rain has fallen to know if you need to water or not.” At 78, Cusack and his wife Viviane have spent a lifetime cultivating nearly a hectare of terraced land surrounding their home, planting tomatoes and harvesting artichokes, pressing grapes into wine and olives — from nearly 100 trees — into oil.
But for Cusack, who in addition to being an avid gardener is also a psychologist who started and directed a successful clinic for treating alcohol addiction in the nearby village of Cabris, counting drops of rain goes beyond mere pragmatism to what he calls his “climatological curiosity”.
“It’s interesting to observe the changes in the climate,” he says, flipping through his little notebook. Deeply creased and reinforced with transparent tape, this notebook dates to 1995, about when his last daughter — the youngest of three — went off to university. His previous notebook, started in the late 1970s, is carefully stored in the cellar, on the creaking wooden shelves above the concrete receiving tank the family long used to press wine.
His passion for recording his observations may go back to his father, who cultivated floral bulbs in Dublin, Ireland before migrating with his family to France in the early mid-1950s. As a child, Cusack remembers getting up in early summer hours with his sisters to collect the jasmine flowers his father sold to the local perfume industry. Upon the death of his parents, Cusack came back to reside in the family home with Viviane, and since then has been a fixed presence whose practice of recording the rainfall helps him track and understand the changes in the world around him.
These changes include dry years, like the “extraordinary event” of 2021-2024, a regional drought during which rainfall plummeted to just 50% of normal levels – fifty centimetres instead of the average one metre. Or 2003-2005, when between only 62-68 cm of rain fell, or the one-year anomaly of 2007, when there was only 40 cm. There have been wet years, too, like 2014 and 2002, each with nearly 1.5 metres of rain.
More than simply data, his measurements are like Proust’s famous madeleines, unlocking memories. Turning the grid-lined pages almost all the way back to nearly the beginning of the notebook, he lands on another wet year with a metre and a half of rain, 1996. “I remember I had to take a flight then, and when I got to the Nice airport it was flooded.”
His two pluviometers – essentially small plastic measuring cups staked into the ground – are small, with one measuring 100mL and the other 80mL. In a rare heavy downpour, he’s had to check and empty them midday.
In our age of digital saturation, it might be tempting to dismiss Cusack as merely a Boomer clinging to his old analogue habits.
But Cusack is hardly a technological Luddite. He regularly checks his weather app at the dinner table, offering a run-through of that evening’s worldwide temperatures to whoever will listen. He had a swimming-pool sized basin built to store and pump into his garden the spring water filtering down through his terraced hillside property. He has invested in a drip irrigation system to save time, reduce evaporation and conserve water.
He has even bought two expensive digital systems to measure rainfall, but he was less than impressed. “All it takes is a leaf, or a bit of wind from the wrong direction, and they don’t work.” He shrugs. “Maybe I needed to invest in something even more sophisticated.”
Which means that for the foreseeable future, “sophisticated” is simply human power. Or, humans, plural – because accurately counting raindrops is a family affair. When the Cusacks are off traveling and rain is forecast, he alerts his niece, a neighbour, who obligingly checks the pluviometers at the appointed time and sends him her reading via WhatsApp. For years he cross-checked his numbers with his sister, another raindrop counter with her own precious notebook, who lives on an adjoining property. Though she has recently given up the practice, Cusack’s middle daughter carries the tradition at her home in the country 10 km away – though rainfall there may differ by as much as 25-30%.
Cusack’s quiet morning ritual of flipping open his weathered notebook to record rainfall is an antidote to the constant pings and notifications of modern life. It’s a practice, in the deepest sense, that allows Cusack not simply to grow better tomatoes, but to experience the fullness of time. After 50 years at this, the days may be too many to count. But with the help of his notebook, the raindrops will never be.