The Rain Committee in the Folding Chairs
In the driest summer I can remember, a lending committee drove out to inspect my pasture and brought the first rain in forty-three days.
The summer of the long dry was the summer the committee came out. I say committee because there were five of them, all in good shoes, and they had driven an hour and a half from Oklahoma City to look at my pasture and decide whether it could support the herd I had described on paper.
It could not, at that moment. The grass was brown, the stock pond was a muddy saucer, and the sky had been the color of a new nickel for forty-three days. I set up folding chairs under the big hackberry tree, poured iced tea from a thermos, and gave them the tour. They looked politely at the dust.
I want to be honest that I did not plan what happened next. We were sitting there in the shade, five lenders and one rancher discussing stocking rates, when a cloud I had not noticed drifted over the ridge. It was a small one, gray at the edges. A drop landed on the committee chair's clipboard. Another landed on her tea. And then the whole sky opened up, a real prairie cloudburst, the kind that bounces off the ground and comes back up.
Nobody moved. I think they were too stunned. Five professionals sat in folding chairs with their loafers filling up with water, laughing like schoolchildren, while I stood there with my hat in my hand. The U.S. Drought Monitor showed our county shifting a shade the next Thursday, and I have always believed it started with five strangers and a thermos of tea.
The loan was approved, though I would like to point out the paperwork had nothing to do with it. They said the pasture looked greener already, which was generous. We moved the chairs into the barn and ate cold fried chicken with our feet up on hay bales. Folks on farm.FM keep asking me to repeat the story, and when I do I leave out the part where the committee chair asked to borrow my boots.
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