RAIN

It is raining. It has rained all day. My wife is making chicken soup because soup goes with rainy weather. It’s been a lazy, wet, boring, sleepy day. My wife has had the soup simmering since breakfast.

“The secret to good soup is plenty of time,” my wife told me earlier. “Time equals flavor.”

I liked that phrase so much I had to write it down on a legal pad. The same pad I am using to write you. I made a note to work in that clever sentence.

“Time equals flavor.” That’s good.

Anyway, my dogs have been cooped up because of the weather. Around 10, they went stir crazy and started a pro wrestling league in the den.

So I left for the quiet porch.

Only one week ago, I was in New York City. It rained downtown. It didn’t faze the city. Life kept moving. Horns kept honking. But here, a rain stops everything.

I can smell my wife’s soup from here. She made it from a chicken we bought from our friend, Lonnie. Lonnie is a strange hippie who names all his animals. Apparently, the chicken’s name was “Daisy."

My wife likes to know these things before she buys chicken. She likes to know the bird had a good life and, if possible, a Christian name.

Once, Lonnie tried to sell us a frozen chicken he had named “Mary.” My wife wouldn’t take it because Mary was her mother’s name.

I take a break from writing to read a book. It’s not high-brow literature. I’m a little embarrassed to tell you.

It is Minnie Pearl’s book of jokes. I’ve almost finished the entire thing on the porch today.

One joke is particularly good:

“A teacher wrote a sentence on the blackboard, which read: ‘I ain’t had fun all week.” The teacher said to her class, ‘How can I correct this sentence?’ A boy in the back stood and said, ‘Maybe you oughta get a boyfriend.’”

The smell of chicken soup is strong. Suppertime approaches, and I am getting hungry.

It’s past 5, and I still haven’t figured out how to use the phrase, “Time equals flavor” in this column.

The rain falls harder. It’s loud. I can hardly think, let alone write. The humidity has made the legal pad limp.

And I smell wet earth. Have you ever smelled a million acres of pine, saturated by Heaven? It smells as good as it sounds.

Some people associate rain with sad things, but the farming people I come from do not. No rural person would ever think badly of rain. Rain is a gift.

My wife shouts, “Soup’s ready!”

I stand to leave the porch. Before I go, I catch a glimpse of my legal pad.

One phrase reads: “God bless Minnie Pearl.”

Another sentence is underlined.

I was going to work my wife’s phrase into this column. But it’s raining too hard, and I’m feeling too lazy.

Maybe I could slap the sentence onto the final paragraph and hope it means as much to you as it does to me.

Because it’s true. All the things I have gone through, the ingredients of my life — the heartaches, triumphs, failures, victories — impart taste.

When they have simmered long enough, maybe one day I’ll find that no part of my life was without meaning. My experiences made me into me. Yours make you into you.

And make no mistake about it, we are great works of art. It just takes time.

Because time equals flavor. ■

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MASA MTS works hand-in-hand with benefits health plan administrators and transport companies to ensure you and your family have no out-of-pocket costs no matter which provider completes the ambulance transport within the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and while traveling in Canada.

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