THESE TIMES

We in Western Washington are in our hardest stretch of weather. It’s mostly freezing rain, showers, rain, more rain, drizzles, mizzles and downpours, and we’ve got another few months of it staring at us. Our cold and rain loom like an extended sentence in the hole.

In 1989, I lived just outside of Washington, D.C., where I worked for Gannett News Service and was around people from around the nation. I’d often ask those people what they thought when they thought of our state, and a common answer involved the words “rain” and “depressed.”

The area west of the Cascade crest does have the rainiest...