When the Rains Came

Heat waves still snaked above the cracked earth in the gloaming of the old farmer’s final day. These fields that his father had left him, under which his grandfather and great-grandfather restlessly lay, now filled his eyes with dust, a single tear turning muddy as it traveled the dry creek beds of his sunburned face and fell, silently, into a desiccated rut left by the now-rusting tractor. It was the first water the stunted corn had seen this year or last. A mocking rain, too late to wash away the foreclosure, bring his children back to the land - to save his soul - gathered in the sky above. An old familiar pipe riding shotgun above his torpid heart within the frayed pocket of his overalls, he turned his weathered face toward the once-welcoming glow of the farmhouse and tried to force his feet to say their farewells to the land. But they remained rooted.

The first gray drops fell cold on his shoulders, drumming a dirge along the sun-bleached and sweat-stained brim of his old canvas cap. Distant thunder carried mournful echoes, memories of days when the rains came in season with warm starlight and birdsong, the harvest with cinnamon in the kitchen air and canning jars in boiling pots steaming the home’s windows. The way things just were. The rain came harder now as he mourned the porch, the swing’s rusty chain creaking like the joints of old bones, still moving but without the weight of purpose. Inside, he knew that all his years now huddled together in recycled-cardboard boxes, the mover’s labels marked with their epitaphs - living room, bedroom, washroom, grave.

Planting his fading gaze into the parched dirt that swallowed it as thirstily as the dark rain, he thanked God for the travails that had made him tough and strong for a time. He’d known loss with each good dog that took its final rest on that porch. He’d suffered the wounds of harness and hitch, bleeding into the soil that fed a nation. Joys and sorrows had been his and filled his cup till it runneth over, Amen. But what measure of a man is taken with this despair - a loss so deep that it has a taste all its own, like ashes from the slow fire that consumed his soul?

Then, a familiar hand touched his sagging shoulder, wrinkles and calluses, spots of age and scars of wisdom gracing it - still strong and gentle enough to pull back the split leather of life and caress the heart within. He covered her aged hand with his own, straightening as much as the years would allow, turning slowly and looking into eyes still as clear and blue as the heaven they would share, long after all the acres of the earth were fading. The smell of rain on leaves old and new, the warmth of her touch, those sorrows and joys that had made him a man drove a hopeful spade once again into the soil deep inside, turning it to welcome seeds that refused to die. There would be some green shoots yet.

Scotte Burns is a writer, speaker, and co-founder, with his wife Toni, of Journeys to Love, a multimedia quest to explore love’s origin, nature, and purpose through more than 100,000 miles of motorcycle travel across America.