- Julie
COME THE RAIN
And then it was August, as told the sun with her creep towards bed, early and earlier yet. As evidence to her claim, those of us nonplussed by summer’s hurtle towards fall might reference Garden and Cow: the weeds cometh and the cream line pales. Could tell it all by the calendar, sure, but I can’t imagine why anyone'd bother.
As these summer days wane, Luella’s milking stanchion remains functional-yet-roofless, meaning that: when Weather arises in milking hours, I am in it. One recent morning I sat milking Luella as a misty rain settled on what little of my skin could be found. Neck, wrists, ankles. What a gift, that rain. Truthfully I am bit unsettled at the thought of a roofed milking season bereft of the baptism that is a soft rain on the flannel-warmed backside of a neck. (Mmm, amen.) There's little better than a soft rain on a warm morning. It's wont to a slow build towards anything that might make you miserable. It is Weather, yes, but comfortably so. You can even imagine yourself to be the sort of person that really lives in this world Come What May (hell or high Weather, she pleasantly milks) and though an arguable claim, there’s no harm in a little 5 a.m. self-satisfaction.
Rain. Sometimes coming to bless your bent frame while yesterday’s kind found me cursing the whole damned operation that has me sitting under a thousand pounds of heaving orneriness twice a day. Got over it soon as my socks were dry though, go figure. If in the future of shingled milking stanchions cloud-sent blessings are scarce, I imagine I’ll find some corner of the homestead, back curved and neck stretched toward some godforsaken ground-rooted task, in which to accept my anointments. And as it goes, I imagine it’s in that same corner under different skies that I’ll damn the path that brought me there. Can't be helped. In matters of the soul, the line is fine between -moving and -crushing when Come the Rain.
