Warning! Unbridled Cheesiness Ahead!

West Texas has always seemed to me to be a place that has been forgotten. By who or what I don’t really know, but all you have to do is take a look around to see the evidence of this negligence. It’s been forgotten by culture: very little art, no feats of architecture, no steady streams of stimulating music, theater, fashion. Even ideas fail to permeate our borders. It’s also been forgotten by one of the simplest things that creates life, a substance that permits the existence of anything green, that allows for lakes and rivers, for skin that doesn’t itch daily from mucous membranes that no doubt resemble some long forgotten fossil discovered in a bed of hot clay. All of this neglect and disregard tends to make people (myself obviously excluded) tough, weathered, and sinewy, a sort of beef jerky existence.

But every now and then something happens that threatens to change all of this. Something occurs that makes you feel that, even for a moment, this place has been remembered.

Our dry spell ended at about 5:30 this morning. It’s been nearly eight months since we’ve had a drop of rain. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living in humid Central Texas for years now, lost my resistance to the desert, but there hasn’t been a day since I’ve been back that I haven’t taken a moment to think about rain. How nice it would feel on your skin, how good it would smell, how only a little of it would wash away the inches of piled-up dirt from the tops of houses, barns, churches, and cars. How good it would feel for your cells and pores to finally be able to take a damned drink.

It was about 5:32 when the thunder woke me. My parents were already outside on the front porch, holding hands, watching what has to be the best alarm clock ever invented. No one said a word to each other. We just stood there and eyed the fat speedy drops, each of us smiling a shit-eating grin. Even Muppet seemed to be aware of what she’d been missing. She shot out from the porch and did laps around the wet yard. Of course it ended almost as soon as it began. I think we had a total of 15 minutes of rain, hardly enough to help agriculturally. I know this sounds ridiculous, and I’m not much of a spiritual person, but this brief rainy spell was ridiculously uplifting for all of us. And it was, by far, the best church I’ve been to in a long, long while.