The morning forecast predicted another six days of rain.  I turned off the radio box, sighed slightly and then resigned myself to another six days of staying indoors.  I went down to my basement and took stock of my supplies.  I was running a little short on a few things, but I had enough food to last another two months.  While others would have to risk the heavy rains and floods to make it to Market, although it might not have food after all this rain, I could stay home and enjoy my temporary security.

The rain had been falling most every day for the past month and I had spent my time indoors catching up on things too long neglected in favor of reading.  The first thing I did was clean my house.  After that I reorganized my office and then my kitchen.  I’m not sure why I reorganized my kitchen, it was in perfectly acceptable order, but the organization spirit remained with me after I finished a badly needed reorganization of my office, so I expended my energies on the kitchen.  When I completed my work in the kitchen, I embarked on a more thorough cleaning of my home and discarded a lot of useless items. 

While doing that, I found a picture of my dog playing in the yard outside.  She had a serious, but happy look on her face and was very much immersed in a game of fetch.  Looking at her now, asleep on the floor at the foot of my bed, it was hard to picture her outside.  Before she was always playing in the yard.  She ran through the high grass to fetch a ball or to run down some animal that had foolishly trekked into her yard.  There weren’t many animals in the yard Before, but there are fewer now, so few.   Not that it matters, my dog can’t go outside now, not with the rain.

I managed to construct a well ventilated area in the basement for her to use as a makeshift yard.  It has real grass that actually grows.  It took some time to get the grass installed, but it went smoothly after I designed a filter that removed the impurities of rainwater so I could water the grass.  It took her a while to get adjusted to the “yard”, but need helped her figure it out.  She’s a smart girl, it didn’t take her long to make sense of it.

With all the house work done, I found myself with nothing but my pile of books to occupy my time.  Despite all the time spent at home recently, my to-be-read pile managed to get the best of me.  I hadn’t been much of a reader Before, but I was now reading a great deal, often instead of other things that were probably more important.  But when you are forced to stay inside your home all day for weeks at a time, be it because of rain, extreme heat, dust storms, or what have you, reading somehow manages to become more important than other things (except for my dog, of course).

While drinking coffee, a rare treat given the recent water problem, I finished a novel about deep space explorers who discovered a world where it never rained.  The planet had lots of water, almost seventy percent of it was water, but it never rained.  Despite the sun and lack of storm clouds, the water levels remained constant, animal life was plentiful, and most of the land was suitable for crops.  The explorers stopped travelling throughout the galaxy when they found the planet and made it their home.  Civilization prospered, and the people lived lives of plenty.

After finishing that, I reached over to my pile for a new book.  The pile had grown a great deal during the recent weather fluctuations.  The books that composed the pile were a mix of new paperbacks, well-read paperbacks, paperbacks without covers, and a few hardbacks, all of which had varying dimensions.  The pile started out with about three or four books, but it quickly reached a height of about four feet.  While the weather kept most people in their homes, we always found ourselves willing to risk it in order to track down a box of new books to read.  Fortunately, the extreme weather took time off and most people could leave the house every two weeks or so to pick up badly needed supplies, and getting new books was always a major concern.  I left the house last week, thanks to an unexpected break in the rain, and made it to a neighbor’s to pick up a box of books and returned just before the rain started falling again.  Despite the somewhat regular influx of books, I read so quickly that the pile never got much beyond four feet.  My recent bout of cleaning and reorganization caused it to explode to five feet, which caused me to start another pile next to my prime pile.  The secondary pile quickly grew to a height of two feet.  

Grunting at the work I had ahead of me, I picked up a collection of short stories from the top of my prime pile.  The first story was about a sheepherder.  There wasn’t much to the story, it was about a man who herded sheep for a living.  His land was full of steep hills with jagged rocks and he used the dogs to herd the sheep.  The dogs loved herding the sheep.  They would run after the sheep, get down low to the ground, and stare at the sheep until the sheep did what the dogs wanted done.  Barking wasn’t necessary, the dog’s stare was enough to transmit the message to the sheep.

“To have that much for a dog to do,” I thought to myself after finishing the story.  I put the book down and looked over at my dog.  She had just woken up from yet another nap and was in the middle of a stretch.  She shook a bit, looked at me, sneezed, and walked downstairs to her makeshift yard in the basement.  A few moments later she came upstairs, nudged me a bit for some scratches, and decided to resume her nap.  She walked back to my room, centered herself at the foot of my bed, and slowly turned around in a circle until she collapsed into a ball and closed her eyes.

My dog had become rather inactive as a result of the weather.  So, of course, had I.  Reading the story about the sheepherder made it all too clear.  Just imagining dogs running after sheep all day and people operating a farm baffled me.  While I kept pretty busy around the house, it was difficult to fathom roaming freely across acres of land every day.  I only had a small yard and couldn’t walk across it.

I got up from my couch and walked to the back door to look at my yard.  I stopped for a moment as I passed a closet full of board games.  I hadn’t played any of the games for quite a while now.  The weather had been too bad for any of my neighbors and I to get together for anything other than a brief book exchange, and the month of rain made those brief visits rather risky.  When the weather did allow, we would gather in one of our homes and play games for days at a time.  We also brought our dogs along to give them a chance to socialize. 

Those visits were wonderful for my dog.  She and her pack of fellow dogs would run through a home as if it were an open, untended field and she and the pack were fending off their rivals.  Taking my dog away from her pack was the hardest part about leaving my neighbors.  When with those other dogs, a light appeared in my dog’s eyes, a happiness that eradicated the reality of confinement.  But on her way back from a friend’s home, she moved around without the spark she had as a member of her pack.  On the way home, she moved around the same way she moved around my house now.

I turned my head away from the closet and looked out at my yard.  The grass was long gone; the rain had melted it away.  “Too much acid content,” I said to myself.  The Leadership disagreed, of course, but we all knew the truth.  Rain is just water, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, it doesn’t kill grass.  We all knew it, everyone but the Leadership.  Well, it’s not that the Leadership didn’t know it, for how could they not; it’s that the Leadership refused to recognize truth.