The Wet ...

The back-40 early Tuesday, where seldom is heard a discouraging word but the rain just keeps falling and the grass just keeps growing all day.

... Or deep green, and getting deeper.

One of the first things I’ve done early mornings of late is fire up the computer and check the forecast since the shape various events will take depends on what appears in those little at-a-glance boxes describing what the next few days will bring. Much of the time, they’ve been filled with flashes of lightning and falling rain and the Iowa map has been splotched with green --- flood warnings.

Golly, it’s wet.

The St. Andrew/Grace picnic Sunday, scheduled for a shelter at Corydon Lake Park, was rained instead into Bill’s house --- and that was fine. It’s a spacious house and it was peaceful to sit in the sun room and watch the rain fall as the simplified liturgy advanced --- a dinner plate for the bread, a big green plastic tumbler rather than sterling silver for the wine.

Several of us went from there after lunch to Prairie Trails Museum, which we probably wouldn’t have done if we’d been sitting down at the park high above the water enjoying the breeze and stupefied by too hearty a potluck, and admired the hollyhocks in Bill’s museum garden and took a quick tour. A good day in spite of it all.

If this keeps up, and it looks like it will, there may not be hayrack tours of the Dry Flat neighborhood during our country school reunion Friday; and at the Lucas County museum, artists, crafters and musicians will have to take shelter on porches and inside buildings Friday evening instead of utilizing the lawn and patio as we’d hoped --- and the crowd will be diminished.

Neither event will be ruined, just changed --- but we’d all appreciate a little more sunshine about now. My life is revolving too much around the imperative to cut the grass during every brief dry spell lest it grow out of control and require a flock of sheep --- a rare commodity these days --- to restore order.

And any weather-related woes I may be experiencing are minor when compared to those of farmers, frustrated by way too much of a good thing --- crops planted, washed out, replanted and drowning again.

It rained so heavily here on Saturday morning that city equipment had to be called out to clear gravel that had washed off shoulders and down hills onto West Court Avenue, which follows the course of a long-buried stream from the southwest corner of the square to the Chariton River --- if you could follow its natural course these days.

Makes you wonder what the good Lord is trying to wash away.

+++

I watched “Austrailia” again the other night, a film that I like despite Nicole Kidman’s somewhat overwrought performance. The star of the show once you move beyond Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Brandon Walters as Nulla, the “creamy” (half aboriginal, half white) kid who steals much of the show, is Australia itself. Especially a region in the North where the seasons are divided into “the dry” and “the wet.”

Despite a good deal of murder and general mayhem set in days immediately before World War II, concluding with the Japanese attack on Darwin of 19 February 1942, the producers managed to wrangle a hopeful ending. All films should have hopeful endings. There are quite enough unhappy endings on the real end of life.

The hopeful ending here would be sunshine, a little more of “the dry” and a little less of “the wet.” Of course we’d prefer a little less humidity, too.