“It’s raining, it’s raining, the old man is snoring he jumped in bed and bumped his head and couldn’t get up in the morning.” How many of you remember that little tune? So many songs about rain; “Walking in the Rain” “Dancing and Singing in the Rain” “Rain Rain Go Away and Come Again Another Day” and so many other songs immortalizing rain. I wonder if Noah was singing rain songs. I remember the rain storms that we had when I was young the sky would get dark, sometimes like an early night fall. The lightning would suddenly flash lighting up the sky and illuminating the surface of the lake followed by the deep rumbling of thunder. One thousand one – one thousand two – one thousand three, like a weatherman we would report that “the lightning is three miles away.”
Corky, my English Bull and I would sit on the screened in porch and listen to the rain fall and watch the trees sway and the lake become rougher as the storm came closer. We had a storm one year with rain so heavy that the lake rose up and covered the dirt road with over a foot of water. When the storm stopped and we ventured out again we found a few fish and frogs in puddles on the road, we also went out with our flashlights to crawl around on our hands and knees on the wet grass to fill our jars with night crawlers. We sold the small fish and the worms to fishermen for bait. There was nothing scary about a storm, we knew not to seek refuge under a tree (I saw a tree in our side yard get struck by lightning once and understood why “lightning never strikes the same place twice” that place “aint there anymore.”
If you had to go out in the rain did you wear a raincoat and galoshes or carry an umbrella? I remember hearing the adults say things like “I hope the roof doesn’t sustain any damage” “I hope this doesn’t wash out the foot bridge” but never was anything said that would scare us. Rain happened just like snow and changing temperatures happened. The weatherman would tell us “rain” “shine” “snow” and we knew what to do. If the winds were strong enough the shutters were shut and we stayed in the kitchen where we felt safe, if it was possible that a tornado might go through we had safety. No the rain never scared us we respected the weather and accepted that we couldn’t change it and it wasn’t going to last forever. I will say that we did like snow a bit more after all we never made money for candy shoveling rain off someone’s walk or driveway.