All over Texas, we are having a drought, even here in East Texas. Doing this painting of a big thunderhead raining on the dark brown land brought back so many memories. I grew up in southwest Texas where drought is a fairly common and dreaded experience. Since that area of Texas was a ranching and farming area, rain, or really lack of rain, was always the primary topic of conversation. Preachers in the churches on Sunday mornings could always get a “Amen” from members of their congregation when the preacher had included a special request to God in his prayers during the service that morning to send some much needed rain.

I remember that after a big rain back in the 50’s, which was generally during the night, the next morning, the local ranchers would gather for breakfast at the Kinkaid Hotel coffee shop in Uvalde, Texas. It was of great interest to them to hear just how many inches of rain had fallen on the individual ranches. They would like to sit at the counter in the coffee shop rather than at the tables so more people could participate in the conversation. One morning, after a big rain, my dad told me that he was there with a bunch of them eating ham, eggs and biscuits and drinking coffee and discussing the rain. When each new rancher arrived and sat down, everybody would be looking at him and someone would say ‘Well, how many inches did you get last night?”. He would respond with something like this “Well, at the highway gate the rain gauge had two and a quarter inches in it, however at the ranch house we only got a little over an inch. That dry creek back of the goat pens was running good when I went by and gauging by the heavy thunder out west of the house just after midnight, I might have got more over in the west pasture down by the river”.

The waitress, a pretty young woman who wasn’t intimated by these rough men and their big hats, was walking along back of the counter trying to keep all the coffee cups refilled. She was refilling the coffee cup for Dick Franks, a big red-faced pot-bellied rancher who had a ranch about ten miles up on the Rocksprings highway. He had been bragging about how much rain he had got on his ranch. With a buttered biscuit halfway to his mouth, he looked at the waitress and said “Well how much did you get last night here in town?”. Without batting an eye and with a dead-pan expression, she said “A hard six inches, it was just wonderful.” The hand holding the biscuit froze, his eyes were blinking and his jaw dropped while he tried to understand what she had just said. The rancher sitting next to him started chuckling and soon the place was roaring with laughter.

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