RIVER CITY JOURNAL: A GOOD SHOWER USED TO MEAN COOLER WEATHER ON SWELTERING NIGHTS

Once upon a time, flimsy strips of wood and screen wire, latched with a small hook, separated you from whatever is out there.

Down in Florida, folks prayed hard for rain to put out the wildfires. The rains finally came, so it appears God was in an answering mood. But some Floridians who saw their homes go up in smoke might wonder why he took so long. Surely God doesn't route all requests for disaster relief through the federal government, does he?

In the era commonly known as B.A.C -- Before Air Conditioning -- there were a lot of prayers said during the months of high summer in Southeast Missouri. In the B.A.C. era, there was no television either. TV and air conditioning have changed America in the last 40 years. We have become an insulated society, cocooned in our homes. Naturally, we are able to do this year-round, thanks to central heating (a wood stove used to do) and air conditioning.

Not that our homes in the years B.A.C. didn't have air conditioning. Oh, they had air conditioning. You betcha.

Remember screen doors? And all the windows wide open day and night in July and August? And oscillating fans? And what about iced tea and lemonade? How many gallons, sweetened with real granulated sugar poured out of 5-pound bags, did we consume in our summer quest to keep cool?

Don't overlook that favorite air-conditioning catchall: an evening breeze. "Wait till it cools off tonight and we get the evening breeze." Sometimes it came. Sometimes it didn't.

So we prayed a lot. For cooling rains mostly. "We need a break in the weather," someone would say. "Yep, we need a good shower to cool things off."

Nowadays, it seems a good shower just adds to the humidity, but maybe the current heat wave has made me cynical. In the B.A.C. years, we genuinely believed that rain was good for a respite, however brief, from the long days of heat and humidity.

When you are young and growing up on a farm, you learn to pray for a lot of things. Rain, of course, but not always just to cool things off. When it came time to hoe the garden, a well-timed shower could put that chore off indefinitely. The God who was your buddy would grant such requests. But the God who was your creator held off the rain until the hoeing was done, because he knew you needed to be nourished by the vegetables. That God. He's got it all figured out.

On the hottest of the hot, summer nights, we would go to the screen door and look outside for any sign of stormy weather. Yes, we would gladly risk hail and lightning and thunder and even an occasional tornado if it would just come a good shower. And cool things off.

On Kelo Valley, which stretches from west to east, you could stand in front of our barn and look far down the valley toward where the sun rises. It was about the longest view around. In the Ozarks, vistas tend to be blocked a good deal by those pesky hills. But if you looked away from the barn, down the dry creek bed and across the pasture, you could see almost forever. You could see almost to the railroad tracks along the river a good three or four miles away. But you couldn't see that far. Not really. You knew the railroad tracks were there because you heard the train's engineer warning motorists on the highway just past the river bridge. The sound traveled up the valley, squeezed between the hills, bouncing off the front of the barn. So, yes, it was a long view off to the east.

That's where, on the hottest of summer nights, you would look at the mountains of clouds suspended over the horizon. Even though it was dark, you could see the clouds because of the flashes of light they generated. Heat lightning, you called it. No real chance of a storm from heat lightning. But you watched the light show anyway, wishing the mass of clouds would spread over Kelo Valley and drop a real frog choker on the hot fields and dry forests below.

Rain, God. We need rain. And the cooling relief of a good shower.

Take a hard look at that simple prayer. Nothing fancy about it. Pretty direct. Gets the job done. That's the way most folks in the Ozarks pray. Don't waste a lot of adjectives on God. He knows what you want before you ask anyway. Just make it official. Do the asking. And then wait.

As with all matters of faith, it was always both a relief and a comfort when the raindrops started splattering against the sheet metal of the barn roof. Prayers answered. Relief from the heat on the way. God is in his heaven. All is right with the world.

And then there were the nights when you had turned on the spigot on the pipe that drained water from the pond behind the barn to fill the water trough for the hogs in the barn lot. It took a long time to fill that trough, and you went in for supper while the water leaked through the skinny pipe.

Later, you would remember -- or someone would remind you: "Did you turn off the water for the hogs?" -- and you would head for the pond along the narrow path nearly overgrown with ragweed and lamb's quarter and dog fennel. "Should have turned it off in the daylight," you heard yourself muttering. "Now the snakes will be waiting."

Prayers change to fit the circumstances. On these lonely walks to the spigot below the pond, the plea was simple and direct: "God, you can keep the rain if you'll take care of the snakes."

And you would run as fast as you could in the dark, reaching down to twist the spigot's handle, hoping a big, angry copperhead hadn't decided to coil around it -- don't they always? -- and then dash for the safety of the gravel road between the barn and the house.

I don't know how many times this happened when I was a youngster. I don't know how many times I had to go turn off the water for the hogs after dark. Or how many times I saw the heat lightning in the east and wondered if it was pouring down rain in some fortunate spot where folks were praying just as earnestly for a break in the heat.

All I know is I never got bit by a snake. Not once.

Who says prayers aren't answered?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.