6.13.2008

The Long Rain

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

-Paragraph from The Long Rain by Ray Bradbury
ink pens
It's still storming.

It's been storming for what feels like weeks. Consequently, half the state is flooded, and the flooding is going to make food and gas prices even higher because we rely so much on corn crops- and the flooding in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa is ruining some of those crops.

We're high and dry (well, we're soggy but not under water, anyway). I'm tired of the thunder and lightning. It's cool when we're stormchasing, but at home, Casey freaks out, and, if he's in his crate, has gotten into the habit of freaking out in his crate, and somehow managing to push the plastic tray on the bottom of his crate out, and pull all the fabric on the top of his crate down. (Before and After)

My garden, on the other hand, is loving all the water. The pea pods will be plumping out & harvested this week, probably. And the lettuce is out of control. Anyone want a salad?

The grass loved the water too. Between not feeling well and a wedding and all the rain, the first chance we had to mow in weeks was on Wednesday. We were probably a week and a half overdue on the mowing. I'm glad it's done.

And today, more thunderstorms. There's a doozy of a line on the radar headed this way. Looks like fun.

6 comments:

Becca said...

Is that the one where the little boy gets forgotten in the closet on the one day that it stops raining? I was a huge Bradbury fan from junior high to college. Then, his "Little Assassin" piece scared me so badly that I couldn't sleep...

Joanna said...

I also was/am a huge Bradbury fan- The Long Rain is a story in The Illustrated Man about a group that crash-lands on Venus, where it is perpetually rainy, and all but one of them die or go crazy before they can reach shelter- the Sun Dome.

With all the thunderstorms, I kinda feel that way. The constant clouds and rain may make me go crazy. :)

Matt Moberly said...

Becca is thinking of All Summer in a Day.

The poem about all the rain reminds me of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, based off the cliche "dark and stormy night" opening sentence. The contest is to write the worst opening sentence to a novel imaginable. It's unrelated to this post or rain at all, I know, but it's funny.

My favorite is "The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know."

Kacie said...

I really really hope that the rain stops. It's just insane how flooded the state is.

Anonymous said...

It must be trying to make up for last year when it rained so little.

Becca said...

Man, that story is even more melancholy than I remembered. I'm glad poor Margot got to go home...

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