Forecast

The day before we leave, here in Siouxland the sky is richly azure, as blue as blue can be. An old friend, a native of the area, used to say that out here in the corner of Ioway we get, basically, ten really great days a year. That's it. Today is one of them. I mowed my lawn before ten!

When I checked weather.com for Amsterdam, the ten-day forecast looks unimaginably great--ten days of sun, as unlikely as anything in a world in a seaside country where the sky can be steel gray for days on end. We'll be blessed if the prognostication is even half true, but then, as it goes, some Dutch dairyman may well be, just this minute, begging for rain. What we get falls on the just and the unjust--isn't that the way the scripture goes?--the farmers and the tourists. That sounds better.

Got things to pack yet, but outside my basement window, through crab apple blossoms that wilted before they were ready this year, burned off by last week's freakish heat wave, the sky is as wholesome as a blessed dream.

Here's hoping it stays with us, all the way over the Atlantic, and then some.

And that farmer up in Friesland gets a healthy shot, at least, of his rain.