When the devil’s beating his wife (sunshower)

If you approached the slate blue house from the darkening beach, and behind the curtain of rain, you’d first see a steep wooden stair and a long tongue of slick wooden planking, then the pair of companionable rocking chairs bumping arms shiny in the late afternoon sun. From the deck, the dunes swell upward, half hiding the house.  Behind the bowing sea oats, the house hunkers down against the wind, as it has done for a hundred years of late afternoon squalls, its low roof down-tilted against the building wind, the white storm shutters folded closed and locked. If you came to the house from creekside, late and riding your bike pell-mell through the curtain of rain already spilling across the dunes, down over the eaves of the house, and pooling in the sweep of white shell anchored under the house piers and curved across the lawn, you’d see the palmetto swaying meditatively, escaped fronds dancing into the low-lying bushes. Sheltering under the house skirts like so many orphaned chicks, the bigger cousins’ bikes, ridden in hard and dumped wet.

In the south, the meteorological phenomenon of rain on a sunny day is explained as "the devil is beating his wife".  It seems to originate on the British Isles because Jonathan Swift used a very similar metaphor...