When you see drops of rain on your windshield and immediately think your radiator hose has sprung a leak, you know you’re in a drought.

Or maybe you’re standing somewhere in the out of doors and a drop hits you in the face. You look up to see if a bird flew over.

You’re desperate. You do what you can to make it rain. You leave windows down on vehicles and clothes on the line. (Don’t laugh. The cost of operating a dryer to produce heat that has been abundantly free this summer has probably prompted some thrifty souls to string up old-fashioned clotheslines. Just guessing.)

If you’ve ever been a newspaper reporter, you know that writing about no rain is one way to make it happen. Yep, if you report it’s never going to rain again, your news story gets soaked.

By the time my words are in print and floating in cyberspace, maybe I’ll be made to look a fool for talking about our unbroken drought. Here’s hoping.

 For now, maybe we can incur God’s favor (rain) by thinking of things to appreciate about our parched circumstances. At least we haven’t had to mow lush lawns. Everyone on our block, including us, has given up on green.

It’s probably a great time to buy a lawn mower, unless you’re superstitious. That’s one of those expenditures you can make to keep it from raining. It’s like buying an umbrella.

On the other hand, umbrellas work as parasols to protect you from the sun if you live somewhere like West Texas. So go ahead and buy one for sun protection. That might make the sun go away.

 Superstition. It’s a bit of a sin, or so I was taught. That leaves only prayer. Either way, except for cloud seeding, drought-breaking rain is really out of human control.

 Except I did manage just now to coax a few drops from the heavens with my write-about-the-drought approach. A trace is better than no rain at all. Alas, it’s quit already.

 Yes, it’s a challenge to stay positive, but if you’re counting on the weather to dry out and bleach a cow skull in record time, it’s been the perfect summer. We’ve got two bleaching on our place – two skulls of renown, meaning they have horns. The others don’t count.

No rain means it’s a good time to get a roof replaced or repaired in case it ever rains again. Except for the heat. Step on an asphalt shingle in the heat and those granules move. You’ve damaged the shingle and also lost your footing. Excelsior! Unless gravity prevails.  

 In conclusion, one more positive thought. If you don’t like strangers and aren’t happy that people are fleeing other parts of the country for Texas, you can hope that heat and drought will give them pause.

On the other hand, if they choose to live here anyway, maybe we’re in the Promised Land and just don’t know it. 

Hanaba Munn Welch is a correspondent for the Times Record News who divides her time between Abilene and a farm north of Vernon.  Her columns, as a tribute to the Childress Engine 501, always contain, amazingly, 501 words.