Rain, Rain (Please don't) Go Away: Come Again Another Day

Rain in Oakdale brings a new and different kind of reassuring, if unanticipated calm, and especially now. For some time, California has been experiencing routine and persistent droughts, as if someone on high is holding out on us.

This issue, while an inconvenience to many, is felt all the more acutely in places like Oakdale, where industry is primarily agricultural, and our very subsistence, not to mention general economic improvement largely rests on a key variable over which we have no control.

If there is no rain, there is no Oakdale: the grass would permanently yellow, crops would wilt and perish, and animals would thirst.

Many who live in town are nevertheless often caught unprepared and the normal sartorial precautions one might expect to witness elsewhere are not even given a second thought (as if it were an affront to our sense of personal survivability to actually outfit ourselves in appropriate ways).

Nevertheless, we press on, while the rainclouds pour and the streets fill, patently surprised at the presence of a thing that they are incapable of swallowing: somehow we make it through.

Many are annoyed, but those of us who are doomed to be kids at heart no matter what our age still take pleasure in pushing headlong in pooled bodies of parking-lot street water, lamenting its inevitable dissipation by the unfun gods of City Park and Rec.