I Like Watchin' the Puddles Gather Rain

My neighborhood pharmacy, Utley and Jones, in addition to minding my medications and paying more attention to my prescriptions than I do always offers me to a receipt when I pay as well as a small printed slip with an aphorism, words of wisdom for along the way, whenever I pick up my order.

This past Saturday's was appropriate for both our weather this time of year and for the beginnings of our seasonal and emotional reflections as the old year draws down and a new one races to be born.

I smiled as I read "life is not about waiting for the storm to pass...it's about learning to dance in the rain." And people laughed when I had the cobbler put those taps on my galoshes. Whimsical or prescient? Sometimes there's no way to tell. 

Which is also very true of our lives here on the ant farm sometimes. Our shops if not halls are decked with boughs of something suspiciously resembling holly that  battles other fragrances and sights for place of pride as we hurry and scurry searching for that special something for the holiday table, hoping again this season our blessings will outnumber our problems. As a casual reading of the headlines and glance at the TV news reports will tell us, things are still tight and times are still tough.

Walking up Washington Street from the Harbor on Sunday afternoon enjoying the crisp fall day (while wondering how many more there will be before November turns dreary) I saw at least three more "For Sale" signs on houses than I remember from a fortnight ago. It’s only human to wonder when the tide will turn.

We've just finished choosing state and local political leaders for the next two years-I'd like to believe we made choices based on hopes and hopefulness and that we'll use part of the upcoming holiday season to let those whom we've chosen sit and speak together and define those areas where they can agree and move forward as well as those areas where they have different perspectives and perhaps different ideas on how we need to continue along.

Perhaps a gift we can give to all those whom we've chosen is our sincere belief they will do their best every day for each of us and for all of us.(Call it 'the benefit of the doubt' if you're world-weary and wary) And that another gift we can offer is that of our patience and so instead of insisting on immediate miracles, we allow them an opportunity to know what they don't yet know and to learn to work together.

The holiday season will be here before we reach the end of this paragraph and there's so much to be done we can be paralyzed by indecision and never start, and so we can never finish. We can hope the clouds of adversity will pass over us, our families and our city and fear that they never shall or we can learn to dance in the rain.

-bill kenny