Where are all the octo-pies?

It is the Saturday before Memorial Day and it is raining.  I feel that I should say something poetical about it.  I am waiting for the poetic muse to strike me.  For the seeds of creativity to sprout.   Hmmm.  It rains.  It is raining.  It shushes.  Rain firehoses its way across the lawn.  Rain schloffs softly over the grass.  It pours. 

OK, so my muse is on vacation or something.  It, however, is pouring out there, dribbling over the back of the air conditioner in my window, pattering on the windows, and when the wind blows it– it– it- does something whispery…

I could make metaphors.  I’m good at metaphors, especially the mixed kind:  Rain dumps like the laundry of an unmarried kid home from college for the weekend.  Rain splatters like a can of blue paint tipped from the top of the ladder onto your white carpet.  Rain stands around the porch in filling galoshes, waiting to come into the back hall and relieve itself the rug.  Rain makes mud with the same eagerness as a six year old in the sand box with a glass of water.

Rain is inevitable.  You can’t start it or stop it, you can only endure it.  Sometimes you stand in the dry furrows, like a farmer looking to the horizon, hoping for clouds.  You breathe it like relief when it becomes an extension of hard-purchased irrigation water, yet you fear it, knowing how quickly it can stick the leaves of fledgling crops to the thick mud.  Just the right amount, you whisper to the elements.  Please, this time, just the right amount. 

There are so many things like rain.  Children, for instance.  You hope for them, but inevitably, as the days get long in their presence, just endure them.  Then they’re gone, and you wonder where the time went.  And other things:  Jobs that become merely vehicles toward a paycheck.  Days that drag.  Meetings (any kind).   Winter. 

It rains.  I endure. 

It can only last so long.