Terry: Make sure your bucket holds water

I know it has been a pretty wet spring because I’ve dumped rain out of my gauge more times this year than in a long time. I had just become a little perplexed at why everyone else was reporting more than I received.

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If they got .9 at Dora I just got .3. If they got half an inch at on South Globe I got .3. If Floyd got an inch and a half I still got .3. If I checked the gauge while it was still raining I occasionally had .4.

Something wasn’t adding up — namely the rain in my gauge.

I had bought one of those big plastic gauges that you can see from the porch, or at least my eyes used to be that good. Finally after sloshing through the puddles to get out to the gauge I thought to examine it a little more closely. Sure enough, a crack right there at the 3-tenths mark.

The discovery left me feeling a lot like Hank Williams. You remember Hank, “His bucket had a hole in it and he couldn’t buy no beer.” I couldn’t buy no beer because my wife had already figured out to start betting me we had less than .3 every time I headed out the door to check the rain gauge — and she took all my money.

I replaced the plastic gauge with a glass barrel one and went out to check it the first time a few hours before last week’s storm was over. I couldn’t believe it! The darn thing read .3. It was still raining so I threw caution to the wind and left without dumping it. The thing would only hold four inches as opposed to the 6-inch capacity of the plastic one.

That evening when I came back the reading was at .9. Finally a good rain.

Then on Thursday I noticed a Facebook post by the National Weather Service in Albuquerque which painted a pretty rosy picture of rain that been falling mainly on the eastern plains. Apparently Roswell has the wettest start this year since 1941 and the second wettest May on record already.

In my life I can only remember a time or two when I went out to my rain gauge to find it had run over. With water I mean. I’ve seen lots of times when it ran over, but mud was caked two inches deep in the bottom.

Measuring the rain around these parts is an important thing. We love to read reports in the newspaper about who got how much rain. It’s the first question we ask friends if it rained the night before.

It was so important to my dad that we had a rain gauge scratched into the headstone on his grave.

Scripture tells us the rain will fall on the just and the unjust and I believe it’s true. Still, it’s hard not to cry when you find your bucket’s got a hole in it.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]