I recall from my youth hearing old folks talk about what was important to them. Mostly they talked about how well they slept, or the weather, or perhaps how the rheumatism was acting up. Once in a while they said the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
Well, I don’t have rheumatism, and of course the world IS going to hell in a handbasket, but that is such common knowledge it is hardly worth mentioning. You do NOT want to get me started about sleep . . .
That pretty much leaves just the weather, which is the real reason I am writing. It is raining. I am under the roof of our gazebo. Wood blazes in the fireplace next to me. Long yellow fingers dance over red glowing embers. I hear the pitter-patter of raindrops. Sometimes, for five or twenty minutes, the pitter-patter becomes something more intense. It becomes vaguely threatening, but without being scary, like when a shih-poo barks at a rottweiler.
The summers here are dry. Weeks, even months, go by without a drop of rain. Cactus and palm trees, plants that send their roots more downward rather than outward, they do well, but almost all else dies unless irrigated. This probably has something to do with the bliss that I feel sitting by the fire, listening to the rain.
Or maybe it’s the Old Fashioned, made with maple syrup and quality bourbon.
But I think it’s the rain.