The church bells were all ringing together every time a rain hail storm was getting closer to our village. They were supposed to scare away the clouds. The kids would make the sign of the Holy Cross and would run quickly so as not to get hit by lightning. We had heard a lot of stories from our grandparents, each one scarier than the other, so we all ran for cover each time we saw clouds gathering. I used to see my dad thrusting the axe in the ground so the clouds would not bring hail with them.
We were raised with a sense of responsibility towards agriculture. My father was an important farmer, growing grain, corn and other cereals since we were little. Also he had a lot of animals. I used to hear him tell my mother:
This is a dry year, the earth is all cracks and I don’t know how our crops will grow, with this lack of water. But the Good Old Man won’t leave us like that, he said, encouraging himself.
That’s how he called God - the Good Old Man. I didn’t see him pray, but he always had his own special connection to God, and God would help him when he needed it most.
He had his agriculture, me and mom had our garden. We used to go and water each and every seed with a cup of water, in the evening after the sun had set, so the seeds wouldn’t get scorched.
I’d see dad upset that it hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks already. He would go out the door and take a long look at the sky, hoping to see a cloud, but each day appeared to be even hotter than the one before. It was so hot that you would feel yourself melting.
One day, seeing him so upset, I was thinking about how I could help him, and I remembered how me and the kids used to play at the fountain behind our building. So I took a bucket, filled it with water, and started jumping all around our yard and throwing cold water on myself while singing a hundreds-of-years-old Romanian enchantment-song that should have brought rain:
Paparudă, rudă,
Sai în sus și udă,
Udă cu găleata,
Ca să crească roada!
This is the song:
And I’d keep on throwing water on myself, running crazily all over the place, honestly believing I would end the drought that way…
I saw dad driving in the yard and I was so happy that I threw a cup of water on his car, not noticing the opened car window...So the water ended up in his eyes and all over him, spilling on his famous moustache.
He babbled something, but my excuse was decent enough and the effort was appreciated and worth it because rain finally really came. It was even a big storm, but it was the first time I was so happy to hear the bells ringing to send away the clouds.
Did my experiment really work, or was it just a coincidence? What do you think?
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