The weather ruled our summer. From June on, there was never a day that didn’t revolve around the dry skies, the dry ground, the heat. We pulled hoses at work. We ran sprinklers at home. We drenched for crown rot and sprayed for pests. And while the fall plants responded to the attention beyond all hopes, no effort of man was sufficient to sustain the fields, the roadsides, or take the gray haze of fires far away from the skies.
So when I drove home in a driving rain the other day to Tarkio’s empty and quiet streets, I pictured the inhabitants of every house inside, dry and cozy, watching water stream down the windows, down on their knees in thankfulness for the refreshment. If they weren’t literally kneeling, surely, like me, they felt a relief, a deliverance over and above all expectation. While our human brains know the weather will always turn, our human hearts can be discouraged, beaten down, wrung out of gratitude.
Rain. Some years, some droughts, you kinda stop looking for it; the forecast never changes, the heat never wavers. But this year, we could see the rain on the radar: it was always out west or up north. Even if those green or yellow reflections drifted across the Missouri, nothing reached the ground. Showers would pop up...and fizzle out. Neighbors and friends and acquaintances all across the state told the same tales. The USDA forecast record yields everywhere else. But here is Mis-er-y, all we had was company….
Then, one day, as sudden as a tropical monsoon, the rains came. The first three inches didn’t budge our pond a bit. But the next week’s inch brought a few inches of cover to the bare cottonwood log on the bank. The next two inches made the grass grow rank so quickly that lawn mowers roared into life early every morning. If it wasn’t raining! But we didn’t complain, even if Labor Day activities were of the indoor variety and we squelched and slid on the sodden grass loading our trailer loads of drippy mums.
The corn fields are weary and bedraggled, yellowed prematurely with big brown dead patches on the steeper thinner hillsides. Blake brought in ears from the bottom and ears from the hillside; the hill ears are thinner and shorter, like the lean and mean cows of Exodus.
It will be a leaner and meaner corn harvest. Sometimes the ears don’t dry properly when the plants die prematurely. The lines at the elevator will certainly be shorter. Maybe we will pick most of the corn before we even start soybeans, which appear to be maturing normally. But the nearly 7 inches of rain in August will refresh the earth, replenishing our shallow wells. The football boys won’t land as hard on the field. There will be fewer grass fires or field fires than last year. Perhaps the cover crops we sow will germinate. Here’s hoping the trees and grasses, gardens and crop land will go into the winter chock full of moisture and ready for more than 2018’s 48 hours of spring!
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