It rained again yesterday. It would have come as a surprise to me, but it rained a bit two days before that as well. And last weekend we had some more rain, I think. I lose track of the amount of rain since it rained all spring and even on the nice days it rained. At some point this summer it’ll rain for three days straight and the owners will grow restless. There’s Water Everywhere, someone will text. I’ll be sympathetic, for sure. My yard is high and my basement is dry, but I still know the struggles of too much water. I stripped the roof off of one of my first houses and then it started to rain. It poured. And the rain came through the ceilings and into the house and onto the floors. I was intending to renovate, so it was a catalyst more than a catastrophe. Today, I’m grateful for the rain.
My favorite cousin lives in Boulder. He’s Mr. Boulder. Through my cousin’s lens, there is nothing finer than Boulder. While I respectfully disagree, I appreciate someone with such a profound appreciation for their home town. As fate would have it, my Boulder cousin married a Boulder girl, and in a twist, her family lives in Beloit. My cousin and I make good use of his in-law visits, so I have also been a beneficiary of this marriage. Recently, when driving with my favorite Boulder couple, my cousin’s wife commented on how green everything is. It’s so green, she said, her Midwest roots feeling stimulated by the life in our summer. Boulder, for all of its things, is also a dried out tinder box of wind swept prairie. Why do we get to spend our summers surrounded by green? Because of this rain.
So today, I’m grateful for the rain and the green it provides. I’m grateful for the blooming lupines in my yard and my hydrangeas that are timidly pushing out their summertime wares. Without so many days of so much rain, we couldn’t have these things. Sure rain makes corn and corn makes whiskey, but I don’t even like whiskey, so I’ll instead be grateful for the green of our shoreline and the green of our roadsides. For the green of my garden and the green of my prairie. If we were in Boulder we’d spend so much time begging for rain, but here we just have to wait until tomorrow.