This rain is getting to be entirely too much. I’m not a farmer, though if you caught a glimpse of my strawberry patch you might be willing to consider a scenario under which I have, indeed, missed my true calling. I have this garden, with growth everywhere. There are some vegetables in that garden patch, but mostly it’s just grass that I tilled up last fall with the John Deere tractor that I bought to make me feel like a farmer. The garden is growing, my raspberries are, too. The grapes are vining as they should, the apple trees looking like apple trees in every way except the part about the apples.
Truthfully, the garden is only okay. It isn’t great, but it’s enough. Now that the tilling is done, I admit to using my tractor only for superficial things. Like what? Well, like I’ll see a rock in the woods and think that it should be somewhere else, anywhere but there. So I’ll fire up that diesel, and I’ll scoop the rock up with the bucket. It might take me a few tries, but it would take me fewer tries today than it would have last year, back when the tractor was a brighter shade of green. I’ll then drive around with that rock in that bucket, holding it in there like a rare prize, parading around this property until I find a place where that rock should be. Then I’ll dump it there and put the tractor away. This is the sort of farmer that I am.
Since I’m not really a farmer, I don’t view this rain like a farmer might. I think they like it here, but they don’t like it when it’s too much, like it has become in other places. What I know of corn I learned from cliches spoken around my farmer relatives, so I’m pretty sure that corn like rain and humidity and heat. This might not be the case, but the corn is growing inches every day, and I’m assuming they’re growing in that manner because they are, as I would like to believe, happy. This rain, as I don’t need it for my crops and I don’t need it for my water table; it’s just a bit much.
I’m weather immature, and I know it. I fight with the weather at all times. I’m keen to appreciate it when it’s right, when it’s sunny and still, or if I’m looking to sail- when it’s sunny and windy. I curse that same sailor’s wind when I’m trying to keep a fly aloft in a narrow stream, while at the same time thanking it when it blows only enough to keep the pasture bugs off my face. I have a narrow range of weather that I find acceptable, depending, of course, on the season. My summer desires wish for sunny and clear, and should you think that sunny and hazy would suffice, well, then you know very little about the extreme nature of my weather-lust.
While I watch the weather more closely than I should, I have increasingly become okay with it. I think I may have, at this ripe age, made my peace with it. Sure I want it to be sunny and 80 this weekend, who doesn’t? But I can also appreciate the other sort of summer weather that is generally cursed by anyone who doesn’t have crops in rows. Summer rain is unlike fall and spring rain, and rarely do I find a summer thunderstorm to be an unwelcome event. I don’t want a basement-flooding rain, but I do like a rumble of thunder and a steady pitter patter against my windows. If summer weather doesn’t include a thunderstorm or 12, then I’m not interested.
I hope it’s sunny and hot this weekend. I know the water will be blue, but I hope it’s that ethereal shade, the one that only pops when the sky is cloudless and the wind is just so. I hope it’s like that, so you can sit outside on your pier and soak in our sun. But if it’s rainy, and you have to trade your pier for the porch, and the lake washes gray and not blue, I think that’s just fine, too.