This Month's Story
The drought had been with us for several weeks and the plants around the house had become dry, unable to suck moisture from the dry earth. We heard tales from friends miles north of us whose crops had failed and whose wells had been unable to keep up with their farm’s demands. Slidell, the Louisiana city just to our west was suffering even worse than we were. The Mississippi towns to our east were also suffering, but not as bad.
Our house and the houses along our street were tied to the twin cities of Bay St Louis and Waveland water departments. They got their water from a deep aquifer and so we suffered but not as bad. However, both water departments were worried and reported on television that, if things didn’t improve, in a very short time we would have to go on a water ration system.
I write a Sunday column for a local paper and decided to see if I could somehow write a personal cry in my column for help to alleviate the situation. I didn’t think my small effort would do any harm, but it was worth a try.
It didn’t take me long to write and I ran it in the paper that Sunday.
Well the next day, Monday, was dry, and so was Tuesday, and Wednesday.
But on Thursday, everything changed. It started to rain. I mean really rain. It continued this way Friday and Saturday. Rain! Lots of rain!
When it was all over, Slidell reported that they had a total of 28 inches of rain! Along the Mississippi coast the water mostly ran off into the Gulf, but further inland there was flooding. Slidell was shown on Saturday’s TV to be the worst hit of all. Businesses, houses, streets were flooded.
Sunday it stopped and everyone spent the day cleaning up. We were lucky. Our house was built on a coastal berm and we were not really bothered by the water; it all ran off quickly into the Gulf immediately in front of our house. We spent the day sympathizing with those that were bothered and doing what we do every Sunday; putter.
Evidently Slidell’s flooding was extremely bad. The TV news late Monday evening showed that Slidell was launching a massive plan to deal with flooding of this type in the future. (It turned out that they were serious and the following month the TV showed the city’s earth machinery preparing a massive drainage pond).
I wasn’t entirely free of the stigma that came with the large rainfall. Late the following week I was called to come to the office of the senior editor of my column’s paper. I wasn’t really worried; they didn’t pay me that much and from everything I heard, my Sunday column was very popular. I doubted they would let me go.
My editor was sitting when I came into his office, looking very unhappy. When I sat down in the visitor’s chair opposite him, he shoved a bunch of papers across his desk for me to read. There were quite a few of them. They were letters and they all followed a central theme. Quickly scanning them I found the theme was my column before the rainstorm. They didn’t like it.
I shoved the letters back across the desk. The editor picked them up and turned toward his wastebasket and, without hesitation, threw them into it.
He looked at me and sighed.
“Paul, I want you to make a promise to me. Don’t put any more prayers in your columns!”
Well, I followed his orders and never did. I remember the column I wrote the week before Hurricane Katrina. Its theme was the need to enlarge the women’s restroom in the newly built municipal building.
Oh yes, the column I wrote before the 28 inch rain?
Here it is. But please promise me if you do, don’t read it aloud, do it in a closet in a little used room in your house and after pushing all the empty shoes into a pile, burrow into them and using a flashlight, read it softly in a very tiny voice.
“GOD, SEND US SOME RAIN!
“God, don’t send us the namby-pamby rain. Send us the rain that comes down in big drops. Cold drops. Drops that will hit the ground with a wallop. That will stir the dust. Drops that can fill gallon buckets in seconds! Drops that you can watch come walking down the road toward you, smacking the ground, bringing with it crackling flashes of snapping lightning and with it the rolling deep whamming bass of strong thunder!
“God, I want to be chased into the house by raindrops the size of marbles and cold as Jell-O. I want our dog to go running into the darkest closet and our cat, to hide under the big bed.
“God, give us a one-incher, no, make that a two-incher. Make the rain lash at the windows looking for ways to get in and get us. Make the thunder be a boomer, make it make enough noise to show us that this time you are serious, and make the lightning that goes with it snap so hard and bright I can smell the ozone.
“God, make this rain stay for a while, hitting the ground, burrowing in, soaking the earth. Make it wet things that dearly need wetting, things that have shriveled and, with parched leaves, have dumbly pleaded for water. Let this mass of rain give them that water.
“God, then let there be followed by a long, steady fall of soft rain, let the rolls of your mighty thunder become subdued and your blinding, flashing lightning become mere blinks in the sky. Let the big rain move on to the east to visit the people in Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Ocean Springs. They need rain too. Give them that rain
“God, let this gentle rain fall softly for the rest of the afternoon and on into the night, putting us to sleep with the promise of a damp, wet earth when we wake tomorrow.
“God, we thank you. Amen.”
