Every time we start to feel sorry for ourselves and think we have it bad, we can easily look around and find someone worse off.
But try selling that to the farmers this year. It’s not unusual for the agricultural community to be concerned about the weather. But usually it’s concerns over lack of moisture or about an early frost.
This year, it’s too much moisture. A lot of farmers were not able to seed all of their land before the rains began. And now it’s mid-June, the land is muddy and time is ticking on this year’s growing season.
But we don’t have to worry about mudslides — there’s no where for it to slide, it just lays there.
In the Oliver area of British Columbia, house and orchards were wiped out on the weekend when mud came sliding down on them. Fortunately, no one was injured, but several people lost all they had.
Earlier this month, the ground opened up because of a landslide (also blamed on heavy rains) in Quebec and swallowed a house, killing the family inside.
And in Arkansas late last week, rain caused rivers to swell so much so quickly a campground was swallowed up through the night and dozens of people — caught totally unaware — were killed.
We are not immune to weather-related problems. Nature can be terribly unkind, unleashing winds that rip roofs off of houses (such as last week south east of Moose Jaw), uprooting trees and damaging vehicles. Several basements in the city have taken on water due to the recent abundance of rain. And summer hasn’t yet started.
It has not been a good year for weather. From the earthquake that shook the daylights out of Haiti to the volcano in Iceland that stopped world travel for a few days, nature has been messing with us all year.
So we should appreciate days like today when the sun is shining, the winds are relatively calm and we can feel summer on its way. Someone, somewhere isn’t having it quite so nice.
Times-Herald editorials are witten by the editorial staff.
