It rained for five days. Not hard, most of the time. It was more that the air itself was wet, a fine gray mist that came in off the bay and hung in the streets and got into everything, my hair, my socks, the pages of my guidebook. On the first morning I said something about the weather to the woman who ran my bed and breakfast, and she looked out the window and said, pleased, "Ah, it's a soft day." That is what they call it. A soft day. By the third one I had stopped carrying an umbrella. Nobody else did. You just get wet, in Galway, and then you go inside somewhere warm and get dry, and then you do it again.

By the fourth day I had nothing dry left to wear, so I found a laundrette on a side street off the main shopping street and paid a young woman with headphones to do what they call a service wash, which means she does it for you while you sit there. I sat there. There was one other customer, a man of about seventy in a tweed cap, who had brought in exactly one thing to dry: a heavy cream-colored sweater with cables down the front, the kind they knit out on the Aran Islands. He put it in a dryer by itself, fed the machine a coin, and sat down next to me as if we had an appointment.

"Your first time in the West?" he said.

We talked for forty minutes. Mostly we talked about the weather, which I had always thought of as the thing you talk about when there's nothing to say. It is not like that there. He had, I swear, a dozen ways to describe rain, and he used them all, and every one meant something slightly different: the rain that comes sideways, the rain that doesn't fall so much as wait for you, the rain that means the fishing will be good. I didn't write any of them down. I have regretted that for three years, and I've also been glad of it, because if I'd written them down I would have stopped listening.

The sweater, he told me when I asked, was his wife's work. She had knit it for him the winter they married. She'd been gone four years, and he did not let anyone else wash it. He only ever dried it, a few minutes at a time, when it had got too wet on him. "She'd kill me," he said, "if I shrank it now." When the dryer stopped he took it out and held it up to the light and checked it over, all the cables, the way you'd look over a child who'd just come in from outside. Then he put it on, right there, warm, and he looked about ten years younger.

He told me there was music that night at a pub down near the water, and I should come. I went. It was a small, low room, packed, steaming with wet coats. In a corner there were two fiddles, a flute, and a man with a round frame drum he played with a little stick, and they didn't seem to start or stop so much as move from one tune into the next. Somebody put a pint in my hand. I never found out who.

Late in the night the players stopped and the room went quiet, and an older woman sitting at the bar began to sing, with no instruments at all, in Irish. I didn't understand a word. Nobody explained it to me and I didn't ask. It went on a long time, rising and falling and turning back on itself like the mist in the street, and nobody moved, not even the barman. When she was done there was a pause, the kind of pause that happens in a courtroom right before a verdict, and then everybody went back to their drinks as if nothing had happened, and the fiddles started again.

The man in the tweed cap was there, in his sweater, at a table by the fire. He raised his glass to me from across the room. I raised mine back.

On the fifth morning the sun came out. The whole town looked washed. The bay was the color of a new dime, and the gulls were going crazy about it, and the woman at the bed and breakfast said, "Well, now, isn't that grand," in exactly the voice she had used for the rain.