I stood on the flat roof of the small Westside house that I grew up in, looking out over a familiar Los Angeles neighborhood and beyond. Visible through Japanese Elms and palm trees, the Santa Monica Mountains cut against the clear blue sky in sharper tones of green than normal. Sheets of rain had fallen the night before, clearing the skies of their smog and kicking off a week of periodic deluge in a sunbaked city. The late December storm capped off a wet and snowy month in what had otherwise been a dismally dry year for California. In the Southland, it was easy to feel relieved, if wholly unprepared.

The tarpaper roof of our century-old house, which does its job 350 days per year, revealed what was probably a longstanding leak above the bathroom. The morning after the first bout of rain promised clear skies for long enough to attempt a repair. I woke up to a cup of coffee in the kitchen and half-used bucket of roofing tar sitting on the porch. My dad, who had used the first half of the tar in the previous rain storm six months prior, had a fix in mind, so we climbed up to the roof.

As these things go, the fix demanded a resupply of tar, so we made our way to the hardware store as the clouds moved back in. On the drive, I watched as the city responded to water falling from the sky. In our neighborhood, hoodie clad homeowners scratched their heads at clogged storm drains and dug ladders, tarps, umbrellas, sandbags out of recesses of garages. On Washington Boulevard, drivers careened, doing their best to maintain control as the rain brought months of motor oil to the asphalt’s surface. Driving over Ballona Creek, I watched the city’s refuse rage to the sea down the concrete spillway, making the Santa Monica Bay unswimmable. At the hardware store, bewildered Angelenos scoured the rack of roofing tar and patching, which had temporarily been moved to the front.

Yet, despite the disarray, a sense of relief hung in the air. People greeted each other with, “Wow, we really needed this, didn’t we?” The news of more rain, along with Sierra snowfall that was being measured in feet as opposed to inches, brought with it a respite (if only temporary) from an oppressive and existential drought. The crisis has been well documented, so I won’t belabor it here. Suffice to say that, in a city that has always been running out of water, the last few years were the most desperate on record. So, despite a recognition that one storm is a metaphorical drop in the bucket, our city, famous for its sunshine, spent the end of the year celebrating rain.

Back on the roof of my childhood home, I took a second to think about the peculiarities of growing up in Los Angeles. Here is a megalopolis that probably shouldn’t exist, where kids know the smell of wildfire smoke and learn the word “drought” in first grade. Where skyscrapers are built on rollers so they won’t topple in the “big one,” which has been overdue for decades. Where we check water quality ratings for the ocean after it rains, and bodysurf when Heal the Bay says “A+.” Where our drinking water is transported 338 miles, through deserts and over mountains, by an aqueduct that was killed over. Where, despite the panic it causes, we look up at the rainy sky and say, “thank you.” Thank you for giving us hope that we will live another day.

As for the leak, it still hasn’t been fully fixed. But we’re calling it good enough until the next rain storm.