A Pitiful Rain Column

I have to say that the dust on my dashboard is thick.  To be honest the dust on just about everything is thick these days. Then there are the cracks in the ground. A good friend told me the cracks in his fields were wide enough for a family of four to take a vacation in. If I didn’t know any better, I would think I fell asleep and slept through the whole month of June and woke up in July. I am not sure what happened, but it sure seems like we went right from March to July with no moderate weather in between.

Even the weatherman on tv started hoping for rain, even on the weekend. That means this dry spell is serious when even the town people would give up a weekend for a little precipitation. It really hit home for me when I mowed down hay on a night when storms were predicted and sure enough they built up in the western sky, the wind picked up, lightening started flashing and then nothing, absolutely nothing. You know it is bad when even having hay down doesn’t bring a decent rain.

In all this watching the radar, the horizon and clinging to every twenty percent chance of rain in the forecast I have noticed something that is kind of amusing. After each rain, nearly half of the friends I have on social media will post that the rain clouds mysteriously split and the rain went around them. Either I have the unluckiest friends or it that is a farmer or rancher’s way of expressing disappointment about not getting the rain they had hoped for.

I get it and last night I was the one who was telling everyone that once again the rain clouds split and went around my farm. Oh, I know how this works and I know that soon it will be my turn and those clouds will come right over my farm and bring the much-needed rain. Still, I fall into the same trap that all my friends do and lament the fact that once again the rain did not fall where I wanted it to adding to my anxiety about my crops.

Its funny how we stew and worry over something like the weather that we have absolutely no control over. I am not quite sure why I listen to the forecast like I do. Last week rain was forecast, and I decided not to lay any hay down and missed out on a couple of good haying days all because I listened to the weatherman. Kind of makes me wonder why I go through all the time and effort to listen to so many forecasts if not even one is going to be right.

The night before the forecasted rain I was talking to a neighbor who had gone ahead and mowed hay down. We discussed the chances of rain and he reminded me that a thirty percent chance of rain also meant a seventy percent chance of dry weather. The next morning, I awoke to dark clouds and thunder, the radar showed a line of showers heading toward me. Just as they got closer, you guessed it. The clouds started to dry up and the rain disappeared. That morning my social media feed was filled with friends who had similar experiences of the rain disappearing before it reached their thirsty fields, funny how that works.

I am not sure how to do a rain dance, but I am quite sure that I can look it up on the internet and learn how to do it myself. Who knows, YouTube probably has a whole channel on how to do a rain dance, I would look it up, but I am afraid of what I might see. A wise man once told me that timing has a lot to do with the success of a rain dance. In any case, I am about to resort to a rain dance, after all what do I have to lose? Certainly not my dignity, I lost that when I started whining about how dry it is.

The bottom line is that my father is right (yes, I have reached the age where I can admit that my father is right), many times he has told me that there is no point in worrying about the weather because there is nothing we can do to change it. That is probably a good thing. Think about all the problems we would have if we could control the weather. You think there is a lot of strife and conflict in the world now, wait until someone has the power to control when, how much and more importantly where it rains.

Does complaining and whining about the lack of rain do any good? No, not really. Does it make me feel any better? I thought it would, but I don’t really feel any better. Finally, will I feel guilty if by the time you read this whiny, pitiful column we have rain? Absolutely not and you can thank me later, unless of course, the rain split and went around your farm.