Cruel summer

So we are working on about Day 4,000 of Drought 2007. Despite my jubilant blog post about rain one day in July, we really have had no rain at all in recent weeks. Nashville--and the rest of Tennessee--is just brown now. It's roasted in a series of 100 degree days that would give Twentynine Palms a serious run for its money. I moved from one desert to another. Hmph.

So I've been working on a little project. I've been trying to teach William how to do a rain dance. Now, given a lack of Native American heritage, I sort of had to, well, make up my own rain dance (which may be why it's not working). I made it up the other day, late in the afternoon, on a day in which gray clouds hung in the sky as if it oh, just might rain but didn't.

Here's how you do my rain dance: shout rain! rain! rain! and squiggle your fingers downward in the universal itsy-bitsy-spider-down-came-the-rain motion, first to the right, then to the left, then to the center. Then you do a little jig in place for about five beats, making sure to wave both arms over your head a lot. Then you repeat the whole thing. And repeat it again until you're exhausted.

This is big fun when you are nearly 16 months old and have gallons of energy to spare. William especially loves the rain! rain! rain! part. He's even starting to catch on to the finger-squiggle part. Maybe if we do the dance often enough, it will help?

But you know what's funny? When we lived in Twentynine Palms, we rarely had rain and we knew not to expect rain very often. So I rarely even thought about rain. I may have missed it, but only in an abstract way. The area's default status was dry and brown, and I was accustomed to it. Here in Nashville, it is supposed to be green and lush, and well, it's not. It's sad. It's still greener than the desert, of course, but everything that is supposed to be lush is parched and shriveled instead.

So William and I have taken to staying indoors as much as possible; every day, we find a new thing to entertain us inside. In the last two weeks, we've hit three different story hours, gone swimming in the indoor pool at the Bellevue YMCA, had a play date at a friend's house, gone to the library about four times, gone to the Green Hills mall, gone to the Cool Springs mall with another friend and her toddler, gone to the play area inside the Bellevue mall and so on. I really want to take William to the zoo, but in this weather? No thanks. And I haven't pulled out the water table in weeks, either. It's just too hot out there. Even without the desert's relentless sun, the heat and the bad air quality make the prospect of hanging out in the yard sound kinda yucky.

So here we are, in in the midst of what feels like it will be endless summer. And I thought I'd only feel that way in Twentynine Palms!