We could use blessings of showers

Remember the little ditty we used to sing about wishing the rain would go away and come again another day? It has been a long time since I had that type of thought. Even in the spring when we were getting lots and lots of rainy days, I was always glad. You don't have to live through many droughts to know that water is a precious commodity and a little extra some days can help out in dryer days to come.

We have been on the road quite a bit lately and we have been amazed at how some of our neighboring counties are so much dryer than we are. I don't want to press our luck but I can even see a difference in our neck of the woods to some eastern parts of Vernon County. Our grass is still green. It doesn't need a lot of mowing, but it is still green. One lawn we visited had grass so dry that it crinkled under our feet as we walked across it.

These sights always take me back to the days when we lived on a farm in Cedar County during the early '50s. We had bought 40 acres with a modern house on it. We had a deep well that had never given any trouble. We had an operating bathroom and laundry room plus outside hydrants. This was not always the case on farms in the '50s and we were very proud of our place. We called it "The Four Winds" because it was on the top of the hill and got breezes from each direction. (As an aside, this farm now has an uninterrupted view of Stockton Lake and borders the government property around the lake. But we sold it years ago when the lake was something they just talked about probably never really happening.) Well, back to the '50s. We had a 2-year-old and an infant. Of course both were in diapers. During the summer the well went dry. Lester took large milk cans in the trunk of our car into Stockton where he worked as the County Extension Agent. He filled the two cans with water and brought them home for our drinking, cooking, cleaning, dishwashing and laundry. In the 1950s there was no such thing as either disposable diapers or laundromats. I kept the used diapers in a covered pail for a week and then washed everything at once (whether it needed it or not!) We kept the wash water and the rinse water to use to flush the toilets when it became absolutely necessary.

The dishwater was used to give the children their baths. I usually took mine in the same water after I bathed the children. We didn't even worry about watering plants or the pitiful garden we had.

This condition didn't stop us from entertaining however and one night we had some other couples with children over for a card party. Suddenly a shower came up. The father of two of the children went into the guest room where we had put some of the visiting children to bed, woke up his children and took them outside because they had never seen rain since they were old enough to remember it.

Sadly, the memory was the only gain from that shower as it only lasted a few minutes.

About the time we were making preparations for moving over to Vernon County, the well freshened and we had water those last few months. The thrill of holding your hand under a stream of water in your own bathroom cannot be duplicated. I will never wish away a rain and I welcome any that come. In fact I'm ready for one right now!