A Prayer for Rain

It’s going to rain tonight.

It’s been so horribly dry this summer. It makes it even worse that I’m cooped up and trapped in my house. Outside, the summer squash died without bearing fruit, and I didn’t get a single cucumber. The grass went brown. The sunflowers started to droop. A raccoon demolished my second tallest sunflower, and made off with a green pumpkin. Inside, the sickness went on and on until I dreaded getting up in the morning, but I couldn’t make a GI appointment until I got a working car. Jimmy thought the man who was coming to buy his old Jeep would also trade me something for the catastrophic lemon of a Nissan I named Serendipity. But that deal fell through. Then another plan fell through: the would-be Jeep buyer woke up to find the house mate had left with the money order and also the rent money in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, Jimmy opened up the old jeep that’s been parked in his backyard undriven since 2022, and was attacked by six yellow jackets who’d found a home inside.

As for us, we were too tight on funds to think more than a day ahead. We finally had to borrow a few hundred from a friend to stop an overdraft that lasted for days. I had almost begun to build up some happiness, and it felt like that had all dried up with the grass.

But now it’s going to rain.

There’s a 90% chance of a good thunderstorm by the time I get up tomorrow. After that comes the weekend. On Monday, Jimmy is taking me downtown to see another used car dealer he’s known since he was yea big, one who “works with just about anybody” and might take the Nissan as a whole down payment. Another friend offered to help make payments, if I can just get through until September. Then I can get to the doctor to fix whatever’s still wrong with my gut— though the past week has been the easiest week since June. Maybe it’s finally going away on its own. Then I can go back to finding freelance projects and fixing my way to some kind of happiness. I might even be able to go to church again, and stand in the back, and try not to cry.  But none of this seems real. What’s real is the drought.

I was planning to water the garden, even though it was going to rain. Just to hold the plants over in case the rain didn’t come until morning. Just to give myself an excuse to get off the sofa and move, when all my muscles are out of condition. Or maybe I had completely lost faith in the rain, and believed I’d be disappointed for the hundredth time if I waited on a miracle instead of doing it myself.

Or maybe there was another reason. Maybe watering the garden was a prayer.

There’s a kind of prayer humans have offered for as long as there have been humans. There’s a prayer that involves acting out a thing in order to make it true. Draw a buffalo on the wall of a cave so the buffalo will come to you. Light fires on the darkest night of the year, and the fiery orb will come back. Get dunked in the river in your white shirt one Sunday, soaking your physical body, so Christ will rinse the sin from your soul. A certain man pretends to be Jesus and acts out a supper with a cup of wine, so that Jesus will be there, and the wine will turn to blood. Maybe I was watering the garden with the hose, to see if I could make God end the drought.

Jimmy’s boy came over to watch the incantation. Jimmy himself had gone out to get Adrienne from Cross Country running practice for me, but the boy wanted to stay behind and see the garden. He helped me pick a bag of fresh tomatoes to thank his father first– a nice easy task. You don’t even have to look at tomatoes to know whether they’re ripe. A ripe tomato comes off in your hand with no effort. Then he admired the pumpkin the raccoon hadn’t got, a bright orange orb, ready to harvest months early. He told me his elaborate plan to make the pumpkin into a Jack O’Lantern with a smoke bomb inside, to scare the raccoon, and then I could trap the animal and keep it as a pet.

“All right,” I said finally. “Are you ready to help me water?”

He was more than ready.

Next thing I knew, he had the hose and I was turning it on. Jimmy’s boy must have watched his father water the lawn; he’s much more disciplined than I am about letting out a gentle jet of water that soaks the soil and not the leaves. The only thing he did wrong was to accidentally hose me down every time he turned around to water a different part of the patch– a blessing, since it’s been so stifling hot.

He watered the tomatoes and the sunflowers, the strawberries and the watermelon vine. He watered the dead summer squash and the pumpkins. He carefully hosed down the orange pumpkin to make it shiny. He  watered the potato planter and the rose, which has two blossoms now. Then he went around front in the wan yellow light of the Ohio Valley sunset, to water the smaller flowers in the planter.

I went to turn the hose off, but I turned the dial the opposite way by mistake. I turned it on full blast like a fire hose or a power washer.

“Look!” said the boy.

He was holding the hose up over his head. Water shot out, geyser-like, and fell down all around us, a tiny bullseye of rain on the sidewalk and the grass and all the weeds. He and I were drenched. We’d made it rain, right here in the yard, whether God heard our cries or not– oh, but God had, because somehow I was poor and sick and stranded in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and yet I was happy with friends for the first time in my nearly forty years.

I shut the water off the right way this time.

We played in the front yard as we waited for Adrienne to come home. Finally, there they were. Adrienne and Michael hopped out of the car. Jimmy and his wife asked the boy if he wanted to ride or run back home. He opted to run– pelting down the sidewalk, faster than his father drove.

Behind us all, a cloud front rolled in, smelling of water.

It’s going to rain tonight.