I usually don’t mind a bit of rain. For the most part I just see it as a free car wash so I don’t get bogged down with the drear of it. England is famous for it’s grey weather and plentiful rain during the summer months, and well, most of the rest of the year ... well this summer it seems England has come to Vanderhoof.
St. Swithin’s Day is 15 July, a day on which people in the UK watch the weather, for tradition says that whatever the weather is like on St. Swithin’s Day, it will continue so for the next 40 days.
There is a weather-rhyme that is well known throughout the British Isles since Elizabethan times ...
‘St. Swithin’s day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ‘twill rain nae mair.’
I do not know if there is a similar tradition in Canada but if so it is bad news for those who do not like the rain.
It seems to have been raining now non-stop for weeks. With our relatively short summers here in Vanderhoof a spell of rain at this time of the year can be disheartening and does not help us shake off the winter blues and enjoy our fair share of sunshine before the days start to darken again.
It is easy to be gloomy. Along with many others I have been guilty of doing my fair share of grumbling, moaning and complaining about the weather.
It is perhaps as well to remind ourselves of the plight of those facing the severest of famines in the Horn of Africa. Huge numbers have fled over the border to Kenya and in the Dadaab refugee camp alone there are now reckoned to be 400,000 people.
Overall millions are going hungry. Graves are springing up by the side of the road where desperate mothers have had to abandon babies and small children who have lost their fight to stay alive. Truly a horrific picture is emerging. Yet again the developed world is facing the challenge of bringing aid and enabling development in response to this dire emergency, a tragedy so often overshadowed by local and national news of far less gravity. Back in Vanderhoof we all hope the sun will come out soon and stay out. But perhaps we should be less quick to curse the rain.