Superstitions

I heard thunder this evening.

One loud explosion.

And then silence.

I was in the greenhouse at the time but I ran outside to look.

What? rain? There wasn't any rain in the forecast.

But, outside, the sky was dark and coming over the mountain were a whole bunch of those cliched 'menacing' looking clouds.

I stood out by the greenhouse, in fact, I stood right next to the dry garlic patch thinking. Thinking, "Well, maybe, maybe because I have 18 sprinklers hooked up and 12 of them doing their job, and maybe because I had spent the better part of the afternoon hooking up a new water main (in the trade, called a header) with half a dozen faucets (boiler drains) hooked into the header, with splitters on each drain and from each split a hose connected a sprinkler.

'Because I had invested all of this time in distributing water, maybe,' I thought, 'maybe one of the more benevolent (if not capricious) water gods was going to play with me and give me some rain.

'Glory be', I thought.

And I almost considered performing some sort of a dance right out there in the field (no one was around to see my potentially foolish behavior) no one except, maybe, that capricious but no doubt benevolent minor rain god).

Only, I didn't dance. (You can never tell about these entities. Some of them like gifts, ie dances in celebration, and some of them, no doubt, don't).

Anyway, I need not have bothered. There was just the one roll of thunder, the momentary menacing sky, and that was it.

Five minutes later it was all over.

The sky cleared. The thunder was not heard again, and the ground, if anything, was drier than before.