Nonstop rain can be real pain

Published 11:59 pm Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The world is soggy at my house this morning, but a sliver of sun is peeking through the edge of the curtains. I’m hurrying to get dressed and outside before downpours, which the weatherman says are coming later, arrive to re-soak everything.

Usually I’m happy to see rain because my sandy soil drinks it up almost as soon as it hits the ground. Showers mean I get a break from watering my garden and flowerbeds, but even I am saying, “enough already.”

My body, along with my plants, needs sunshine and a day or so of dry weather. Funny how we humans react to weather, never quite satisfied with what we have at the moment. When it’s dry we want rain. When it’s hot we want cool.

We might be happy momentarily, but give us a day or so of certain conditions and we start complaining. Maybe it is because weather is something over which we have no control.

Even with all our technology, machines that do almost anything for us, the Internet where we search and find out about everything, we still must accept whatever Mother Nature sends our way as far as weather.

Oh, we sure try to predict it and bend it to our desires. I had to laugh this weekend as I listened to the “meteorologists” discuss the weather in Montgomery. Any other time, the likelihood of almost nonstop showers would have them buzzing about percentages and possible flooding and anything else to keep us watching.

However, this past weekend there was a big event that they wanted people to attend. So, they played down the fact that being outside was probably going to be wet and miserable. One of the news folks, in his weather blog, pretty much admitted his forecast was the way it was because organizers needed a decent turnout and predicting a washout was not the way to get people out of their houses.

Soon as the festival ended, the tone changed and rain, rain, rain was all the talk.

Of course, I’m just as bad as the weather people. Yesterday, I did my best to twist the forecast to fit what I wanted to do. And what I wanted was to work in my yard, digging, planting, spreading pine straw — not things you do in the rain.

I checked the radar on the Internet, willing the showers I saw moving my way to change course. It didn’t happen and I spent the day starting and stopping and racing inside every time the skies opened.

At dark, wet, muddy and exhausted I watched as yet another wave of rain poured down.

“Now why didn’t I just wait until the weather cleared to start this project?” I thought, watching my newly tilled flowerbed turn into a mud puddle. “This rainy spell will end; so why wasn’t I patient enough to wait it out.”

I guess the answer is that I wanted control. I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, and I thought by sheer will I could make that happen. Well, yesterday the universe sent me a message — sometimes I need to accept what is and come in out of the rain because it’s gonna pour when it’s gonna pour whether I like it or not.

Buy hey, right now the sun is shining, the birds are singing and there is a muddy flowerbed calling my name. So outside into the soggy world I go before those weather folks mess up my plans with their pesky precipitation predictions.