Silver Linings

The Bright Side of a Rainy August

All photos in this post by John Helms

Anyone that knows me knows that I very seldom look on the dark side of an issue.  It is in my nature to look at the bright side of everything. The rains in the south are wreaking havoc on the people of a couple of Mississippi counties and on thousands of people in Louisiana right now.  I pray that no more lives are lost and that their recovery from this natural disaster will be a speedy one.  I try to keep in mind that many times people gain strength in their lives from happenings like this and I hope that this will happen to all of those impacted by this disaster.  

Now, let's look at the brighter side if we can.  When all of this rain has gone, clear skies have returned and the flood waters have receded, what besides a mess and destruction will be left. People will continue to run the race of life.  Some will have to pick up where the storm left them, others like me will just continue to move down the road of life toward the goals I have set for myself, but all will be afforded the opportunity to keep moving.

I was told during a particularly rough time in my life, "it is times like these that build character in a person.  "I have thought about that statement a lot and the longer I live the more I believe it.  Riding down a smooth road all of the time doesn't do anything for a person.  It is through challenges that we learn how to adapt and persevere to what we encounter. The bumps are not speed bumps to slow us down. No those bumps are meant to make us aware that the road beneath us and to help keep us moving down the road so we can get past those rough spots on with the journey.  I have said this thousands of times, if roller coasters were flat no one would get on them.  That is more true in my life now than  ever before. If one never feel sorrow, they never know what real joy is.  If they are never uncomfortable, then the don't appreciate the pleasure of truly comfortable surroundings.  

"it is times like these that build character in a person...if that is the case I could have my on movie franchise, like Superman or Batman, because I must be one hell of a character for all I have gone through in my life." 

I am no philosopher, but I think we have to witness many events to understand the few events we want to remember.  Let me share an example: Because I have always lived in the southern United States, snowfalls are few and far between. Simply put, it doesn't snow often here. Everyone seems to gets excited when on the very rare occasion that a flake or two of snow falls on our countryside. First we are excited, then we are alarmed and then we panic and go to the store and buy all of the bread, milk and toilet paper on the shelves. We think we will be stranded for days and that we have to be prepared for the worst. We are not accustomed to all that snow brings with it during the rare snowy event here in our neck of the woods.  

I remember as a child going out to play in the snow.  Oh my, that was fun.  If we had any, we would put cheap long underwear on under our jeans.  If we didn't long johns, we would more than likely wear our pajamas under our clothes. We would don ourselves in multiple pairs of cotton socks and slip on a pair of mud boots...uninsulated of course, and any sort of coat or hat we could find to try to keep us warm in the cold air we were so unaccustomed to.  How great the cold would feel on our skin.  Brisk air on our faces, snow crunching under our feet, we would meet up with friends and walk for hours with no where to go and specific destination in mind.  The briskness would turn into cold wet hands and numb, wet feet.  After time we would walk uncomfortably home to get out of our wet clothes and to try and find some hot chocolate or soup to warm our cold bodies.  The warmth of a radiating heat of a floor furnace or if you were lucky, a fireplace would seem as wonderful at that moment as the snow did a couple of hours earlier.  It is strange how that happens what we wanted earlier seems far less attractive to us as time goes by.  The cold somehow makes a person crave heat in the winter and just the opposite in the summer.  

At any rate, soon this rain we are enduring now will subside and return on a much more routine schedule of unpredictableness and we will settle back into our mundane or not so maybe not so mundane lives.  The moisture that this rainy period has left in our ground will get us a few more weeks of growing time for those of us with gardens as we move into a traditionally dry time of year. While we ready ourselves to plant our autumn gardens, the moist soil and hot temperatures will prompt the seeds to germinate quickly and grow fast.  Hopefully they will send down deep roots as the moisture in the soil dissipates from the top down and our fall gardens will be much-the-stronger for the harsh weather we have had here in recent days.  

The days will turn to weeks and the weeks months and soon autumn will arrive with its cooler weather, warm, rich colors and it will be followed by the smell of woodsmoke in the air.  Our gardens will be fading if not gone for the year but we will remember them through the canned and frozen goods we have preserved for colder months.  We will taste a jelly or jam made from the plums or blackberries and summer will come back to us for just a moment.  We will taste it in our minds and we will be there, not in the floods or the torrential rains, but in the vegetables that we picked or the entangled vines we harvested along the pathways of summer.  

Living in the country gives one time to look at things like this and enjoy the life we live. It affords me time to wander down a lonesome forest path or a lane through a pine thicket where i might find a log that is the home to a family of chipmunks or maybe just host to mushrooms or maybe, just maybe on that special walk on that day will lead you to a place that no one has seen in hundreds of years.  It is in that place that I might have a moment that I had not counted on. In that moment I will find a little part of my inner being that I didn't know existed and in finding it discover my special place in this wide universe. It is that lonesome, quiet and secluded part of my world I call "the country."

Rural living is not all it is cracked up to being...it is much, much more.