walking on the dry spot

Ok, you probably get weary of my endless tales of walking the canal with my dog.

But, remember, I'm retired and not much happens in my life...the little things matter more to me since little things are mostly what I've got.

But today's story is filled with awe and wonder. It's like a myth or a tall tale or science fiction. Ready?

As we walked along, it was raining in the woods on one side of the pathway. You could hear the rain in the underbrush and see it falling. It was raining too on the canal, you could see the drops splashing on the water.

The thing was, it wasn't raining on the pathway....

OK, I thought, the wind is blowing and it is just water falling off the leaves. But then I noticed we were on a part of the pathway where trees lean over where we were walking and no water was falling from them. Plus, there was no wind discernible.

Then I thought it must be my imagination, but I met a guy coming the other way who held out his hands, shrugged and rolled his eyes. There was another witness to this phenomena, this freak of nature--rain to the left of me, rain to the right of me, no rain falling on me.

I've heard of 'scattered showers' but this seemed ridiculous. The next person I met looked at me, then looked up and then looked at me. I nodded and he shook his head. None of us spoke, it was a bit to odd and spooky to talk about, I think.

It went on for at least five minutes. I felt like Bela and I were walking through the Red Sea on dry land. It was sort of the opposite of Joe Btfsplk....You don't know that is? He was a character in the comic strip Lil Abner who walked around with a cloud over his head and rain falling from it. People gave him wide berth--Lil Abner and Daisy Mae and Ma and Paw Yokum and Fearless Fostic and all the other characters in that strip.

You can look it up on Lil-Abner.com if you don't believe me.

So we had our walk and didn't get rained on. But when we got back to the car, it was raining in the parking lot.

Truly odd.