Blue skies
This used to be sky above Germany, for about the last six weeks or so. Grey, grey, grey. Lots of rain. People undigging woolly sweaters from their wardrobes and wearing them when it got just too cold for cotton. I’m not kidding!
It’s only since last Sunday that the skies have cleared up and it’s nice and sunny. I can’t tell you how much I’d been missing the sunshine!
It’s probably human nature to long for what we don’t have right now: Some cool winds and rainshowers in a heat wave, and blue skies and warm sunshine during a cold spell. But the light – whenever there are weeks of cloudy skies, I become bad-tempered and moody. I believe it’s built inside us to long for sunny weather – even in winter, when it’s freezing outside, I delight in a clear sky. Blue is my favorite color, after all.
This is today’s sky! What’s your attitude towards sunshine and blue skies?
– Rike Horstmann
You might long for sun and clear skies…but you don’t know longing until you’ve watched the world around you slowly die from lack of rain, as we did last year in Texas. Our state lost half a BILLION trees to last year’s drought, and even though we’ve received some this year, many of those trees are so far gone that they continue to die even now. Grass last year was nonexistent. Deer either did not become pregnant, aborted, or left their fawns to die. Cattle died by the thousands. There were days when our temps were literally higher than those in Death Valley. We had 30,547 wildfires which destroyed almost 4 million acres, almost 3,000 homes, and over 2,700 other buildings. Tens of thousands of head of cattle and horses burned to death, as well as innumerable wildlife. Fortunately and by the grace of God, the number of human lives lost was only four—four too many, but less than it could have been.
Gray skies day after day might leave you feeling out of sorts…but I’ll take that any day over wishing for rain for 6 months without seeing a drop, while the land around you begins to resemble a dead moonscape. THAT is true despair.
I like a happy medium. Right now everything is so dry – the vegetation is dying and we are more at risk for fires and the heat – ugh. I would love for about a week of rain.
I love sunshine and blue skies all the time. Unfortunately I live in Seattle. And seriously, your description of the last six weeks in Germany could have read the same for Seattle, except maybe a day or two here and there of nice weather.