It’s Pretty To Think That Way

 

               It’s Pretty To Think That Way

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Warning: Merrily mixed metaphors ahead.

I do like weather. While some might talk about the weather to keep conversation on a superficial basis, I talk about weather because weather is vital.

What a topsy-turvy year this is for weather. Montana. Mexico. Not much different down here where I live in Jalisco. In other words, it’s an unpredictable mess. I follow eastern Montana weather closely thanks to my daughter, Montana friends and the Havre Weekly.

I can’t help but wonder if this is the kind of weather set up, with all the surprising rain, that prompted the infamous flood of pamphlets that lured homesteaders to such inhospitable locations as eastern Montana with the promise that “Rain follows the plow!”

From our standpoint of distance and history, we might wonder how anybody could have entertained such unfounded, unscientific, unweatherific, illogical, irrational nonsense. But believe it they did, plows and kitchen tools and children in wagons, farmers along with plenty of neophytes left both workable land and inner cities by the hundreds, struggled across what later became several States, built drafty cabins or dirt hovels and plowed the prairies and waited for the rain which never fell and never fell and never fell.

Thinking that if one plowed the plot, dropped in seed, and waited, rain would follow, reminds me of the fairy tale of the Shoemaker and the Elves.

I do like fairy tales. When I had my little workshop in Poulsbo, Washington, I liked to prepare my worktable or station for the next day, set it up with cut patterns or springs ready to tie or whatever the next step required, in hopes that the elves might appear in the night hours and finish the job. In hopes, tongue in cheek. Every morning I had a good laugh when the elves neglected to show. Not even one time.

The difference is that I knew it was a fairy tale, I wasn’t a shoemaker and knew the elves would not come but used the story as self-entertainment.

Not for one moment will I try to tell you that I can’t fall for my own fairy tale. Just a year ago this month, I began preparing for a move ten miles west and further into the mountains and part of my reasoning, this is true, is that it rains more there than here at the Rancho. It does. The water is better, not so super-saturated with minerals and the water system is more reliable. It is so.

Blithely, I managed to ignore other “weather” signs. Some I couldn’t see until I lived under, around and inside them. My decision to move back I made entirely on my own, based on storm clouds mounting on the horizon of history if not geography.

I do like weather. I’m crap at reading weather signs, especially in these turbulent conditions and interesting times.

Rain does not follow the plow. I won’t set out flowerpots with seeds and wait for the cloud elves to drop water. I have pared down my garden considerably, to herbs and a few flowers because flowers are important. I will gladly drag hose from pot to pot on the days when no rain falls. I will revel when the rain drops from the lowering sky.

When I wander into fantasy fairy weather land, I will remember my Aunt Mary telling me, “It’s pretty to think that way.”

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

August 14, 2025

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