Rain, Please.

Back door open and the sound of cicadas coming through the screen and it's trying to rain, it is, and it has rained, in fact, but not so much that you'd want to mention it. These past two days it's rained almost everywhere but here, and rained for long enough to water in everybody else's parched tomatoes—if you watched the radar today, and I know you did, then you saw it trying, trying, building in and then edging its way northwest to southeast, raining in Winston, even, for what seemed like a good portion of the evening. And the streets are wet here, or those parts that aren't under any trees are, but that was not rain, not really, was the kind of thing where only a generous soul would call it a trace.

There's a little something still trying to slide down from Martinsville at this late hour, but I don't want to talk about that, either. Smart money—hell, even the other money—says it probably won't hold together long enough for us.

It's dry. The ground in the bare patches in the back yard is cracked. The birds are taking dust baths in the neighbor's scoured-out side yard. Everything green is starting to get that silvery July/August half-beaten look. We'd come back from it all if we could just get a rain or two. Blasphemy even to ask for this so soon, but I'm starting to check the tropics to see if we can get some tumbledown ragged tropical storm to come ashore somewhere and do minimal damage—maybe take somebody's mailbox out down on the coast, but nothing else—and then get up here and stall out and give us a couple of inches of soft breezy rain.

It's still cool, which means we've probably got the breaker flipped the wrong way there, too. Come on, baby. Give us some rain.