Airn

I used to work for a guy who had a speech impediment. Words that started with "r" for us, did not for him. This usually tripped him up most at the beginning of a sentence:

Can you run to the store? = simple enough to say
Run right over there. = NOT something he could auh-r-angle

--not that any of that is relevant, but he was a farmer, so we talked a lot about a'irn.

Just this last couple of days, we've received an official, welcomed two inches of precipitation! EVERYONE in my realm has been writing about the rain, but I thought I'd let it soak in a bit before I tried to write my ode to it.

I'd forgotten how a fresh rain makes it seem so much like spring. I'd taken for granted the calming effect the sound of falling rain has on me. I'd not paid much attention to the way rain runs off tree trunks, nor how run-off from a field can really tear through a dike or berm. At my place, a fairly flat plat of land, the water just stood and said, "Hey-a!" The whole property, well, the west 1/2 of it, anyway, where my house is, looked like a lake. I had to put down pallets to get to the chicken coop. All the jokes people make about my pirate ship ("he he, you're ready, you know, like Noah, if ever there's a flood") seemed not so out-there anymore.

I wish it were snow. Whenever I say this aloud, people stare daggers at me. Really, though, this rain is beautiful, soothing, all that---but it's too much too fast. Snow would have blanketed things a while, gradually melted into the soil rather than beer-bonging it. (I've never entertained using "beer-bong" as a verb before, and it didn't really work, but....you get a vivid picture, so I'm running with it.) This rain is a wild one-nighter, while the snow would have been more like going steady.

Now, I am all for fun and excess (I am an American, after all) but when it comes to my precipitation, I like it slow. Like my food and my dancing.