Rain Dance.

There's a line of storms and heavy rain back behind the Appalachians, so here's hoping that can hold itself together well enough to make it here. The ground directly under the Chinese Firs has gone dusty again, the kind of indicator I look for in the summer and fall, but not now. Rain, please. And can I get you anything else with that? No, thank you. Just the rain will be fine.

The fancies want to clear it off tomorrow, then give us another shot Thursday and Friday. Still: By then it will be February, and even if we get the top end of what they want to give us tonight and Thursday, we'll be at least an inch and a half under for January alone. Never mind the ongoing D-4 drought left over from last year. This is this year. Same drought. New year. You have to wonder how much longer we can get by getting half of what we're supposed to get. And this: half doesn't even seem so bad. Toward the end of last year it seemed like we were lucky some months to get any rain at all.

I'm ready to do whatever it is that's needed to appease the gods. If everyone could please bring one goat to the village square, we could have a festival: face painting, the moon bounce, a few sacrifices here and there. The game where you toss rings into the field of coke bottles, and if you win, you get the five-foot-tall stuffed bird for your girlfriend. Guess your height and weight. Guess your birthday. We're gonna need one of those things that whips you way up into the air in a steel cage. We're gonna need some bumper cars. Some bleachers so the kids have somewhere to make out. A funnel cake stand. Or elephant ears, depending on where you grew up. We are going to make it rain, people. We have got to figure out some way to make it rain.