The Empire Strikes Back

Daddy, I think I forgot how to put up the shield. Care to refresh my memory?

A tidbit from my childhood since it's 2:30am and I couldn't sleep to save my life... is that I'm a farmer's daughter and in our neck of the woods rain was a blessed, mysterious refreshment not to be taken for granted. I still say when our feet have turned into prunes during the walk across a parking lot that, "this is good for the crops." Only, it's not good when it comes at harvest time and it's not good when it washes seeds away or farmers end up with Buicks in their fields because a road washed out and that's where the cars were carried. Nope, that's not good for the crops at all.

It's been a very wet spring and summer here in Ottawa. A huge chunk of the Midwest is under water right now. I was worried about Ru a few weeks ago because China is experiencing flooding and now her new home is, too. Today our roof leaked into our living room and there's water along the wall in the basement. Did I mention we leave for China in four days and the forecast is for more of the same?

So about that shield. Like all parents who truly love their children, our Mom and Daddy raised us on Star Wars and Star Trek. Shields play an important role in both stories and if you don't already know about that, well, I pity you and am sorry your parents didn't love you. That's a shame.

But back to me. Rain is finicky. It liked other fields better than ours. We'd wake up in the morning to ask Daddy about the night's precipitation because even at an early age, we understood its role in our likelihood to get new Cabbage Patch dolls. The Slemps got rain. Nortons? Rain. Other Farrars living just across the road? Rain. Our little patch of desert? Nope. Nada. And when we asked why this travesty occurred, visions of yarn-haired babies slipping away...Daddy would explain that he'd left the shield up the night before. Oops. The shield was up and the rain couldn't get through.

I think the Empire fiddled with our shield generator because I can't get the darn thing to work at all and the rain, sensing our weakness, is attempting to assimilate us.