Coming in from the rain ~ June 6, 1991

David Heiller

The sound made us pause in the garden on Saturday afternoon like a couple of muck-covered deer.

It sounded like cars on a distant highway, the low, steady sound of rubber hissing on cement, and coming our way in the still air from the southwest.

Cindy and I looked at each other for a second, puzzled. There is no interstate highway connecting Arthyde and Sturgeon Lake. Heck, there are hardly any roads at all. Then we realized that it was a rain shower, its heavy drops hitting the leaves and forest that stretch from Denham west to McGrath, and heading our way.

It was pretty darned rainy!

We’d never heard rain approach like that before. Usually you feel it in the wind as it switches and swirls and turns cold. Or you smell the ozone, or hear thunder. This was just the simple, powerful sound of a blanket of rain ambling like a huge animal through the woods toward us two hapless gardeners.

Sure enough, as the sound grew louder and the highway got closer, we felt drops of rain, at first sporadic, then heavy and steady. Noah Landwehr, who was mowing our lawn, glanced up, then looked our way. “I’m going to keep mowing,” he shouted. I knew he would say that. Even 12-year-olds get fed up with too much rain, which experts say we’ve had, although these experts said we didn’t have enough rain last year at this time.

“I’ll get you a coat,” I answered back, heading for the house for a couple of jackets, one for me and one for him. Cindy soon followed for her coat and two caps, one for her and one for Noah who looked like he’d been run hard and put away wet.

The rain rolled off my coat, drenching my slacks, working its way to inside the tall boots which were heavy with mud. Cindy’s hair hung bedraggled under her cap. Noah mowed on, right through puddles three inches deep, water and grass flying everywhere, like he was water skiing behind a 3½ horsepower Briggs and Stratton. He gave us a sheepish grin and kept on.

“We put the garden in in the rain 10 years ago,” Cindy said as she worked some Frank Larson Angus manure into the soil.

“How can you remember that?” I asked. I can tell you Ted Williams’ batting average in 1940, but I can’t remember working the garden in the rain in 1981.

“It was our first year here, and I remember it rained so much that we planted the garden in the rain,” she said.

Ten years. I’d forgotten that. Things stand out so much when they are new. That was our first garden, and it WAS a wet one. I remembered now, vaguely. We had been as excited as a couple of kids, at our first home, at our adventure in the country, and at our rich garden soil, oozing earthworms and loam and the potential for vegetables that could win first place at the Askov Rutabaga Festival. So excited we hadn’t had the sense to come in from the rain. I guess some things never change.

The rain finally let up, and we straggled inside, and dried off, and had root beer floats in celebration of our crazy mowing and gardening. But we didn’t feel crazy.

You see, normally you don’t mow lawn in the rain, or pull weeds or shape garden beds in the rain. Mothers teach you not to do such things. Grandmas say things like, “He doesn’t have the sense to come in from the rain.” But on Saturday, none of us hesitated. We’d had one too many rain showers this spring, and we all seemed to realize that God would forgive our lack of common sense, working in the rain like this. Heck, maybe He was even testing, to see what we were made of.

I guess He found out, and I think we passed. They say He shaped us from clay anyway. It must have been wet.