the art of rain...

I made my way to Saskatchewan on Tuesday night. After being mistaken for a flight attendant three times, running into a guy from Estevan while waiting for the bathroom and seeing a guy I worked with in Regina over six years ago, I landed in Regina. Marcy and Dwight met me at the airport and we caught up during the trip to Moose Jaw and when we got to their house. We slept for a couple hours and then we were off to the farm in Consul.

If I didn’t know better I would have thought I was still in Burnaby; it was cold, rainy and windy. When I got to the farm, I had lunch with grandma and grandpa, salmon, while looking out the window at the rain falling… Again, I was a bit confused about where I was.

The rain continued Wednesday and most of Thursday off and on, always gray, sometimes windy and sometimes calm, mostly wet. The farmers are thankful but I can’t help but hope the sun will come out soon.

The rain got me thinking though. The difference between rain in Burnaby and rain at the farm is cement. In Burnaby, when it rains you get a little wet. Walking to work or waiting at the bus I get a little wet. The bottom of my pants get heavy and sometimes pretty soaked but that’s easy enough take care of with the heater under my desk.

Here, rain means mud. The mud was so thick and the puddles so deep I almost lost my grandma’s mud shoes on my jaunt over to see Heather and Geoff’s new house. Heather calls the puddles her moat. Evan lost his boots in it today. He got stuck and Heather had to pull him out and leave the boots behind. (She got them out later with a shovel ☺)

I can’t help but think about what a difference the ground makes when we talk about the results of rain. Some surfaces are completely unaffected. Some can be completely reformed with a little bit of moisture. Some are so parched and dry that the water can hardly even penetrate the surface.

I have to wonder what the state of my heart is. How receptive am I to the rain? In whatever form it may come… pouring and painfully harsh, tender and misty, or constantly unpredictable in fits and spurts.