The rainy season.

I was in a rain storm once, on Guam, that lasted for eight straight days of non-stop rain. When the storm started the wind blew the rain at us from the east. When it ended the wind blew the rain at us from the west. Maybe it was the other way around but you get the picture. I was in a rain storm once landing a T-38 jet at Hill Air Force Base where the wind blew the nose of the jet so that it was headed off the runway. I kept it on the runway and lived to tell about it. I was in a rain storm once in Jackson Hole, sleeping me and a dozen explorers in the tall timber where the thunder echoed down Death Canyon in the middle of the night while we were trying to be asleep and felt like it bounced around the canyon for half an hour. Some of my explorers thought they could avoid the rain by sleeping under their canoes. They had different thoughts when the lightening struck inside our camp. I was in a rain storm once fishing at Bonnie Lake in the High Uintas where I watched the lightening march from Moose Horn Lake to Hayden Peak walking right past the lake, and me, as I stood under a tree hoping that it was sufficiently shorter than its neighbors that the lightening would find them first. I was in a rain storm once in Arizona which hid behind a cold front. We watched it come across the desert picking up sand and dirt so that it looked like a mountain which moved across the countryside. I was in a rain storm once in New Hampshire. We watched it on TV as it pushed across the Caribbean, up the Atlantic coast and then threatened to remove New England from the map. It went on for days, but not eight days. I was in rain storms more than once while I was a Mormon missionary in the San Fernando Valley assigned to ride a bike. One of our fellow California missionaries got his picture in the Los Angeles Times water skiing behind a mission car on some of those same roads I rode on my bike. I think we got just as wet on our bikes as he did. All these colored my expectations as I read that Ghana gets more than two feet of rain a year and that the rainy season is May and June. My expectations heightened when I saw three full size umbrellas in the back of the car we inherited. Well, here we are and here it is. Probably three times in the last week we have had rain storms. I took a picture of one. They are not like Guam because they come and go. They are like Bonnie Lake and Jackson because the lightening comes and comes big. The way you can tell the storm has passed is that the car alarms in the parking lot next door finally shut off. So far we have managed to get back and forth from here to wherever we are going without looking like Humphrey Bogart in the African Queen. A rain storm in African looks a lot like a rain storm in Utah or New Hampshire or Arizona. One of the reasons we were so excited to come to Ghana was for the adventure. A little inconvenience; a lot of adventure. We know a lot of people who have been in rain storms in Utah. We know very few who have been in rain storms in Africa. Hopefully my grandchildren will learn the adventure of a good rain storm. Hopefully some of them will get the adventure of a rain storm in Africa.