The Rain, A Cistern, And Gratitude.

As an island pup who loves the sun and currently lives on the desert side of St. Croix, it’s a bit disorienting when it rains for three straight days and nights in the dry season.

Up in Wisconsin, the seasons are obvious. Summer is hot and humid. The leaves change colors in the fall. Then the leaves disappear and interesting cold stuff accumulates on the ground in winter (my humans call it snow and tell me to stay away from it when it’s yellow). Eventually, the snow melts, the grass turns green, the poop treats thaw (though I prefer them frozen in the winter), and then the leaves come back. And we do it all over again.

On our beautiful island, the seasons look a bit different. We do get seasons. But they are subtler.

The summer sun feels especially hot, and hurricane season brings heavy rain. Yellow flowers bloom in late fall, then turn into beans during winter and spring. The Christmas winds arrive right around, well… Christmas. When they come, the sun doesn’t feel quite as intense, even though the temperature stays pretty constant all year long. Winter is typically the dry season. Subtle shifts happen, but things generally follow a pattern. The west side (the rainforest) gets more rain. The east side (the desert — where we live) gets less. It’s a relatively constant climate, just with gentle variations.

But every now and then, unusual weather things happen. Wind blows from the opposite direction. Rain falls when it’s usually dry. And that’s precisely what happened last week. Unusual weather moved in with a vengeance.

Three straight days of rain. The roads were flooded. Forty-mile-per-hour winds were tossing furniture. I’m talking about rip currents galore. Though it (obviously) happens, it’s not the weather we are used to in February, especially on the east end.

As much as we would love sunshine every day, the thing is, the rain is really important. Sure, the sun powers our home (we run primarily on solar energy), but it doesn’t give us water. The rain does that! We don’t have municipal water or a well, what we have is a cistern.

If we don’t have rain, there’s no water in that cistern. Without water in that cistern, my humans don’t have water to shower, my water dish stays empty, my humans can't clean their dishes (though I told them I'd gladly help with that) or do laundry. So as easy as it would be to feel annoyed by rainy days in the dry season, we tend to open our paws, look up, and instead say, “Thank you.”

Even though I want sunshine every day, I need water to survive.

So instead of being bitter when the rain clouds rolled in last week, I tried to channel gratitude for the nourishment they provided. We’re lucky in our home. We have a large cistern, and it can hold a lot of water. After three straight days of rain, we should be good for quite some time.

And don’t worry, the rain was still warm enough to go play in. The kids even raced their sailboats in it. It was damp and a little chilly, but nothing some hot cocoa couldn’t fix when they got home. Rather than spiral into resentment when the skies don’t bend to our will, we’re learning to turn it toward gratitude instead.