Longer than a wet week

Your compiler is submitting this article nearly three months before it is scheduled to run on January 22, 2026, and has no way of knowing what the weather will be like then.   Winter weather in Georgia is notoriously erratic, and was perhaps most lyrically described by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943) in his epic poem, “John Brown’s Body.”    He wrote, 

      Wherever the winds of Georgia run,

         They smell of peaches long in the sun,

            And the white wolf ,Winter, hungry and frore,

                Can prowl the North by a frozen door.

                     But here we feed him on bacon fat,

                         And he lolls by the stove like a lazy cat.

Basically what that means is that late January may be cold as tich’s witty (as folks used to say around Brooks), or wet and soggy as a pond.  It might be hotter than a three-dollar pistol or dry as Ezekiel’s valley of bones, or both, or 75° F one day and 25° F the next.  One just never knows when it’s wintertime in Georgia.   

But rainy weather – we seem either to pray for it, or pray that it will go away.  “Lord, please send us some rain,” one of our entreaties might begin, “but not while I’m driving, please, nor when the school busses are running.”  In that regard, each of us is sort of like Rudyard Kipling’s Old Man Kangaroo, who prayed, “Make me different from all other animals.  Make me popular and wonderfully sought after… by five this afternoon. ”  And the big god Nqong sent Dingo – Yellow Dog Dingo – grinning like a coal scuttle, grinning like a horse-collar; to chase Old Man Kangaroo around Australia.  

Your compiler digresses once more; is there any hope at all for him?

Weather forecasting at times seems unnecessary, for there tend to be long stretches of time where it’s either raining, fixing to, or just has.  What brought the title phrase to your compiler’s attention on this mid-October day when he is writing this column, though,  were two factors:  one, how much he would love to have a wet week for a change, for Fayette County is presently about as dry as the Gobi; and two, the tediously long meeting he sat through recently.

The latter created a restlessness like unto that experienced when your compiler was a kid and it would rain every day for a week.  One couldn’t go outdoors and became absolutely stir-crazy after a while.  This, of course, was before Neal Armstrong’s walk on the moon ruined the weather, as old folks used to think, but your compiler digresses yet again.  Simply put, that meeting he referenced was longer than a wet week.
We Southerners are a people of similes and metaphors, so readers can add this vividly descriptive one to their lists if it is not already there.   But do try to enjoy the rain when we get it, and be thankful for it.   If we’re not, Yellow Dog Dingo might be sent to chase us.