Hartley Neita, ContributorI cannot recall where the headline to this piece, "It never rains but it pours" comes from, but it's a phrase that has been part of my lexicon for many years.
These past weeks the phrase has been with me day and night. Before the first drop fell, my small lawn was mowed, rose plants pruned, weeds painstakingly uprooted, and the hedges thinned, and my garden was looking sprucy. Until noon each day, dozens of buttercups spent the mornings in bloom. It was glory.
Since the rains started, the grass has grown and the hedges have become thick again. Potholes which scarred the road in front of a house on which Michael Manley lived once upon a time, and another spot in front of where his father lived in his last years, have deepened into mini-canyons. My Member of Parliament sends his messengers with his monthly newsletter to the homes on my road, but he has never visited us in person, believing, perhaps, that his seat is safe, and so has never driven his big-wheel SUV on it.
A politician told me years ago that when he goes to a tenement yard he can meet and greet scores of his constituents in this one place. He could therefore not be bothered to visit with people who live on roads in suburbs such as Barbican, Cherry Gardens and Graham Heights. He sent them letters, instead.
"I have to walk 200 yards between each gate, walk another chain on this driveway to talk to only two voters in each house," he said. "That's too much, and let's face it, I'm not getting younger and stronger."
He lost his seat in the next general election.
To return to my reflections on the rain, however, I give thanks every night for my safety, when I see the suffering being experienced by people whose homes have been flooded. I remember touring sections of southern Clarendon during the mid-1980s and meeting a family who spent a night and part of the following day on their roof. Members of the May Pen Fire Brigade removed them to safety.
The two children spoke excitedly about the experience, which to them, was an adventure. You could see, in the eyes of their parents, however, that they were looking at many future years of recovery.
There was another man who told us he was asleep, deep in dreams, when he suddenly felt wet and cold. The room was dark. He rose from his bed only to hear his mattress - "shoogooing" was the word he used. He stepped into a pool of water. He shook his wife awake. They walked slowly through the water into the dining room, and spent the rest of the night sitting on the dining table. Huddled together.
This time, for me and my friends, whatever fright there was came from the lightning and thunder. By day, whenever God decides to give us a reminder of his power, thunder and lightning are bearable. But when it happens at night it is frightening especially when you can hear, as friends of mine did, a tree which had been growing beside their house for over 30 years and had stood strong, wide in girth, and tall for all those years, toppling and crashing to the ground. And wondering if their house would be the next to tumble.
We, of course, are not the only people who are suffering from rains and floods. Watching the world as we can now do on television, floods are everywhere, in the USA, India, and England and countries in Europe. Houses there are also washed away. Animals are drowned, and farms swamped out. We are the world.
At the time of writing this column, the rains which had stopped for a day, came again, briefly. Looking outside now, it seems as if this recent shower has washed the clouds from the sky, and the blue is clean. The rain has stopped and it no longer pours.
And I can now stop playing Here's That Rainy Day, a moody and beautiful ballad by tenor saxophonist, Stan Getz.
