Pacific Northwest Dweller, you’re a hopeful, optimistic creature. A few adorable crocuses pop up and you figure it’s safe to come out of your hovel. You think winter is over, the worst is behind you.

You think there’s a paradise behind each weather front. When skies clear, all will be well. The Pacific Ocean will be yours to dip a toe, a kayak or that shivering, pasty body. Your “backyard” will boast snow-capped peaks, wildflowers, firs, pines and pansies.

Evidently, convoys of snowplows grinding through your neighborhood a few short months ago didn’t leave a lasting impression. Nor did collapsing rooftops or Sea-Tac at a standstill.

A couple of winks from Little Miss Sunshine and all is forgiven. Swimsuits come out, flip-flops become formal wear, and sunscreen flies off shelves and splatters across noses.

Like you, I was once a hopeful, optimistic Pacific Northwest creature, when the slightest glimmer of sunlight could wipe away dismal months of overcast skies. Not this year. Worry about the economy and my mother’s declining circumstances saw to that.

Like most Pacific Northwest babies, I was born shivering and swaddled in rain gear shortly after my first diaper change. Chronic sniffles and goose bumps were a mere symptom of childhood in the Pacific Northwest.

My first umbrella was a rite of passage. Finally, I could be trusted to walk great distances by myself. My umbrella created a cozy world where pelting rain and secret thoughts could make light of even the most unbearable worry.

When my Irish grandmother heard that Dad was helping me grow potatoes, she advised us to do so on Good Friday – an old Irish ritual that may explain Ireland’s great potato famine.

“Good Friday can fall before the ground’s last freeze,” Dad countered. “Nothing softens the earth better than a warm, spring rain.”

Planting my own potatoes, watching them grow and become part of our family dinner rooted my feet in our water-soaked soil. And as Mom worked her parcels of earth, filling them with azaleas and wisteria, I could hear her rejoice as she looked up at a new sprinkle of rain, “Now I won’t have to water!”

Soon, I was singing the praises of rain and its importance to all living things.

When new neighbors blew in from California in the spring of 2005, tanned and energetic, then blew back south on the tails of the Hanukkah Eve Windstorm, blanched and weary, I ran after their U-Haul, gasping, “Wait! It’s not always this bad!”

I watched their moving van traverse down our hill, two surfboards strapped to the top, and smugly whispered, “Cream puffs.”

The next weather front brought flooding, power outages and my exiled mother needing a place to put her cold feet and dampened spirits. Perhaps Mother Nature was trying to tell me something, something about smugness. Perhaps she was telling us all not to get too smug about where we live.

A short time ago, Washington state seemed to be delivering on the American Dream. Work was plentiful, higher education accessible and housing affordable.

In less than a year, even our reliable employers, Boeing and Microsoft, have sacked thousands of employees. Washington Mutual, once the largest savings and loan association in the country, waned into the largest bank failure in American financial history.

In May, the jobless rate rose to 9.4 percent. Still, many economists forecast a leveling off of unemployment, but their predictions are less reliable than the local weather girl’s, whose tools of the trade at least include include Doppler radar, not just mountains of statistical trends and a gut feeling.

The weight of gloomy weather and personal setbacks are bearable in a flourishing economy. Now the Pacific Northwest seems as mean as any other part of the world.

Last week, when my elderly mother saw my worried face at her bedside in Room 101 of the rehabilitation center, she took a breath from her oxygen tube, and said something she often said when life seemed unbearable.

“If there’s nothing coming at you, you’re probably dead.” It was the first time I’d laughed in months.

It rained on the drive home, but I could see things much clearer. I guess it isn’t a cloudless sky that lets the sun in, but the radiant creatures in our lives.

Judy Hauser of Olympia is one of six reader columnists whose work appears on this page. E-mail her at mjhauser@mindspring.com.