This Month's Story

Yesterday, we could see black rain clouds to our north and hear the distant boom of thunder. We knew someone back there was going to get some rain, but we also knew that it wasn’t us. We even got a little of the shading associated with the dark clouds and with this the temperature dropped down to the lower eighties.

But no rain.

It’s nice to get cooled off by our neighbor’s clouds, but what we really need is their water.

This kind of thing, showers everywhere but here, has been going on for some time. Too much time. It happened last weekend and the weekend before. When I complain to someone in Picayune or Saucier about our not getting any rain, they start giving me a long story of the inch or so of rain they had had “just the other day.”

Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.

When you look to actual measurements, even the rains they’ve been having are very small, just barely enough to wet the roads and water a few petunias. They need more, too. A lot more.

I’ve been in the country north of I-10 and from all appearances, the drought is hitting these inland areas worse than here on the Coast.

When you get down to it, we all could use several days of some good old
 hard, ground thumping,
 by gosh, wet and heavy,
 last for an afternoon,
 soaking deep in the ground,
 make a puddle big enough for kid splashing
 kind of rain.

None of us have been getting that.

Nor did we get the normal amount of rain in the spring of this year. That hurt just by itself. Now it’s summer, the time of year when all we can usually expect are scattered showers that are the result of afternoon heating. In normal years, these scattered afternoon showers happen often enough that all of us get the watering we need. This year, we’re not even getting that.

What we have been getting lately makes a joke of the term “scattered showers”. What we have been getting is someone, somewhere gets an inch or so in a short time, in a small area, that promptly runs off. It’s a little like paying a little bit to one creditor out of ten and expecting the other nine to feel satisfied.

The lack of water at the critical growing time in spring and the lack again in summer for sustaining that growth hurt.

You can see the effects of this in the poor showings and colors of the crepe myrtles around town. Usually they present a blaze of color that lasts for quite a while and often comes back for a second showing later in the summer. This year the colors are dim and we have not had a second showing.

The azaleas that I put in last summer are not establishing themselves too well and despite my watering and standing over them with words of “there, there,” two of them have died.

In fact none of the outdoor plants in the gardens around the house have shown the usual year’s growth. They seem to be just barely holding their own. They all seem to be waiting, waiting.

If all of this sounds like I’m unhappy, I am. On the surface, this seems like an idyllic summer day. I’ve been sitting on the porch working on my laptop, with Jennie lying sprawled out sound asleep behind me. Holly is lying on the end of the porch looking for cicadas to eat.

In front of us, the sprinkler is going full force, its rhythmic swing sweeping a tall spray of water slowly back and forth on the lawn.

It’s a soothing sound that normally would produce a comforting relaxed feeling of a lazy summer day - except that I know I’m going to have to get up and move it in a few moments. I’ve been moving this sprinkler since seven this morning. It takes six hours of diligently moving it each hour to water all plants and grass.

What I can see through the sweep of the sprinkler’s water doesn’t help either. About five or eight miles out in the Sound there is a long line of clouds stretched from east to west. Those clouds are heavy with water. In three places in the line of clouds, the seam has burst and I can see rain falling, with one of these breaks dropping a fairly heavy amount of water.

I’ve been watching this travesty for a while now, and the whole line of clouds with the broken rain cells haven’t moved in the last half hour. I’ve been sitting here, knowing that what I am watching is water falling on water.

Yes, I am unhappy.

It’s said that, when faced with bad weather in the Battle of the Bulge, Patton ordered his chaplain to write a prayer for good weather. I think we need a prayer for bad weather.

If I wrote one, it would go something like what I’ve written on the following page.

“God, send us some rain!

“God, Don’t send the namby-pamby rain. Send us the rain that comes in big drops. Cold drops. Drops that will hit the ground with a wallop, that will stir the dust. Drops that can fill buckets in seconds! Drops that we can watch come walking down the road toward us, smacking the ground, bringing with it crackling flashes of snapping lightning and the rolling deep whamming bass of strong thunder!

“God, I want to be chased into the house by raindrops the size of marbles and cold as Jell-O. I want our dog, Jennie, to go running into the darkest closet and our cat, Holly, to hide under the biggest bed.

“God, give us a one-incher, no, make that a two-incher. Make the rain lash at the windows looking for ways to get in and get us. Make the thunder be a boomer, make it make enough noise to show us that this time it is serious, and make the lightning that goes with it snap so hard and bright you can smell the ozone.

“God, make this rain stay for a while, hitting the ground, burrowing in, soaking the earth. Make it wet things that dearly need wetting, things that have shriveled and, with parched leaves, have dumbly pleaded for water. Let this mass of rain give them that water.

“God, then let there be a long, steady fall of soft rain, let the rolls of your mighty thunder become subdued and your blinding, flashing lightning become mere blinks in the sky. Let the big rain move on to the east to visit the people in Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Ocean Springs. They need rain too.

“God, let this gentle rain fall softly for the rest of the afternoon and evening and on into the night, putting us to sleep with the promise of a damp, wet earth when we wake tomorrow.

“God, we thank you. Amen.”