Hope Is a Waterfall

Some days my life is so much heat and dust. It’s a Texas day in the sun, digging for hours through the clay just to make room for a tiny flower. It’s the hot Texas sun turning my skin brown, while I mix the sand and loam to make dirt. I don’t even know my face is streaked with brown from wiping my forehead or that I’ve got a blister from pushing the shovel into ground that was fighting back. Those hard-working days go on and on so long that they’re all I know.

Then along comes a breeze . . . and it blows my hair out of my face. I run through the sprinklers and suddenly it starts to rain.

I like the rain. Raindrops sound like music. A storm in the distance looks like a drive-in movie from our back porch. Rain on the window brings back dreams of childhood. Rain cleans the world.

The same cycle happens with my hopes.

Sometimes they feel so dry and grainy, so much so you’d have to get water to make the smallest bit of dust. The desert would be more inviting. It’s a fight for me to just hold on to them at all. Then a drop falls into my heart, and then another, and another. Why they seem to come at once, like rain, I’ll never know. Suddenly, there’s so much. It’s waterfall.

Waterfalls are like a downpour when the sun is shining. They break sunlight into prisms, shooting colors everywhere, as if there might be pots of gold all over the world, just waiting for you and me to find them.

What could be better--ever?

Hope makes the sun shine brighter.

Hope is a waterfall.

−me strauss Letting me be