Walkin' in the Rain

I was not going to go this morning but Ginger loves her walks soooo much. So I grabbed an umbrella instead of my usual hiking stick and we went. It was just a gentle drizzly rain and really kind of nice. In the Navajo tradition, the gentle drizzly winter type rains are female while the hard pounding summer rains are male. I do see some logic in that--aren't the males of most species more on the wind and thunder and power side? ;-)

Anyway I was reminded of a couple of songs--one none of you will remember unless you're about as old as dirt like I am. The artist was Johnny Ray and he always sang kind of sad, heartachey ones. "Just walking in the rain, thinking how we met. Torturing my heart, trying to forget..." Not really torture but I do recall a lot in this kind of rain. The other song is a bit of a classic, "September in the Rain." It takes me back to a long ago summer or early fall. There were several times when I was going out to a place where we kept part of the variable herd of critters. Probably riding a big old mule I used a lot that we called "Prez" and my dear Dusty came to join me. You have not ":met" him yet here but you will.  We walked for a bit as carrying double would have been a bit iffy for Prez at that point, as he was still in training. And it was raining, off and on, one of those transition type weather days between summer and fall.  Here is a shot of Dusty on Prez on one of those days when I guess I had two mounts with me.

Dusty and I were both wearing cheap straw hats. They were probably made of palm fiber and came up from south of the border. In the politically incorrect vernacular of those days they were known as "Mexican Stetsons" or "Mormon Stetsons" (no slur or ethnic rudeness intended using those terms now!) and we were joking that they might melt. Actually that was unlikely as they were really pretty sturdy. I had a number of them over the years and was wearing one in that photo with Charley Bryant a couple of posts back-- More Equines.

We walked along for a mile or so in the sandy bottoms of the Verde River, on the east and south of Tuzigoot National Monument (a prehistoric Native American site) with arms around each other's waists and me leading Prex by his reins. At that point we'd been friends for about a year and were just edging into a deeper relationship. We laughed that, "every time we kissed the sun came out," although it may have been the other way in reality. Anyway, there were several similar afternoons that September and the song always brings them to mind even to this day. Fond, gentle sort of memories, only mildly bittersweet now, so many years later.

So today Ginger and I walked in the misty cool morning. I hummed both tunes and found the rather novel weather pleasant although I am not a 'water' person at all. Taurus is a very earthish sign and terra firma of the dry variety is definitely my preferred milieu!