There can be no joy in living without joy in work.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274; Italian philosopher and theologian, often seen as a foundational figure of modern thought.)

The Sheep’s Rain this year nearly did me in.

“What the hell is the Sheep’s Rain?” someone just bleated.

If you don’t know, don’t bother asking Google. I just did and found nothing. Absolutely nothing.

So let me tell you all about the Sheep’s Rain, just as my mother told me all about it when I was a child. Without fail, at least in Virginia (where she grew up) and in West Virginia (where she lived after she married my dad) a cold rain always fell around the middle of May, the temps dropped to lower than usual, and the rain kept falling for ten days or so. Farmers never sheared their sheep until after that cold rainy spell in May. They knew that if they did, their sheep would develop pneumonia and die.

Having lived in West Virginia, DC, and Virginia for my entire life–except for five years in South Carolina–I have witnessed the Sheep’s Rain every year since my mother explained it to me when I was a child.

However, when I started thinking about this post, I started asking people I know in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where I live if they had ever heard of the Sheep’s Rain. No one–not even farmers–had any idea what I was talking about.

Who knows. Maybe it was a term used by farmers in Patrick County where my mother grew up. Maybe she, in turn, kept right on referring to the Sheep’s Rain down through the years, dutifully passing the name of this annual weather phenomenon on to her children who still talk about it.

I always believed my mother, of course, and it goes without saying that I still do.

But it does seem to me that I should be able to give you a far better explanation of the Sheep’s Rain than the one that I just gave. Agreed? Thank you. Let’s all have a brief learning moment. I simply must see what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has to say. I’ll be right back.

Well, I have good news and bad news.

I’ll start with the bad news. The OED has no recorded usage of the Sheep’s Rain. Ever.

I am flabbergasted.

Here’s the good news. I will send this post to the OED editors so that they can use it as the first-known printed usage of the term Sheep’s Rain. I never dreamt that this post would immortalize me, my mother, and the Sheep’s Rain. Wouldn’t it be truly funny if it did! Well, it might. Stranger things have happened.

Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way–thank God for small mercies–let me get back to sharing with you why the Sheep’s Rain this year nearly did me in.

A warm spell lulled me into believing that spring was slipping softly and certainly into an early summer. I went ahead and moved all of my houseplants–tropicals and cacti–deck side.

I convinced myself that the Sheep’s Rain might just pass us by this year.

In fact, I started doing heavy pruning, weedwhacking, and brush cutting. I had a plan that would keep me busy for at least a week.

But to my surprise, the Sheep’s Rain snuck up on me and put a wet, cold damper on my plans to work outdoors.

No problem. I am a resourceful fellow, not easily outdone.

I simply shifted my focus to indoors. I cleaned the house. That was a marvelous solution for the first day of the Sheep’s Rain that imprisoned me indoors unexpectedly.

Fine. I can be resourceful for more than one day. Day two found me joyfully polishing the interiors of all my windows. My entire home seemed to be one window after another, bouncing their sparkling, streak-free reflections everywhere. I was finished by noon.

I spent the afternoon re-reading George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for the fifth time.

Then I leisured my way through my dinner prep as the fire roared red in my kitchen fireplace.

Bedtime came early, and the next morning came even earlier as day three of the Sheep’s Rain imprinted itself on my deepening pain.

No problem. My resourcefulness prompted me to bike longer, pump iron longer, read longer, research longer, nap longer, and take longer for dinner.

But. Geez. How much of a good thing can a mountain man take?

I mean. Don’t get me wrong. I love–absolutely love–all of those things. But in their midst, I need something else that I wasn’t getting.

And that’s why the Sheep’s Rain this year nearly did me in.

What I needed–what I wasn’t getting–were the benefits that go hand in hand with hard work.

Stop right now. Don’t even go there. I’m fully aware that cooking and cleaning and reading and research and writing and biking and lifting weights all require hard work, sometimes far more than others are willing to acknowledge.

But I needed to get down and dirty with manual work that leaves the muscles I know feeling sorer than they’ve ever felt before, and that leaves the muscles I don’t know, knowing that they had damned well better get with the program.

I needed to raise my 8-pound maul mid-air and thrust it back down with such force that round after round of oak would pile up in mound after mound of split wood.

I needed to bring order to all of that mounded chaos at day’s end by rhythmically stacking it all into perfectly measured and balanced cords of firewood.

I needed spurt after spurt after spurt of endorphins to be released, to pump me up, to clear my brain, and to make me see rainbow after rainbow after rainbow. Rainbows of hope, arching over me, arching around me, arching behind me, and arching ahead of me. Rainbows. Hope. Everywhere.

Somehow the more that I write about it, the more I’m coming to realize that the Sheep’s Rain this year really didn’t nearly do me in.

Instead, it impressed upon me what I have realized so many times before. I need manual labor to spur me on with my creative labors and my intellectual labors.

Instead, it impressed upon me the wish that when my now is done and my forever begins, I want to keep right on working.

When I reach my home in that land somewhere–that world to come somewhere–I want to be of like mind with that old gospel song:

“Sit down.”

“No, I can’t sit down. I just got to Heaven, and I got to walk around.”

And you had damned well better believe that I won’t be walking around gawking at those twelve gates of single pearls and those transparent streets of pure gold.

I’ll be walking around with a can of Pledge in one hand and a microfiber dust cloth in the other. Somebody, after all, will have to keep all those splendiferous furnishings clean. I won’t mind at all.

After I’m done with dusting, I hope to find a hand plow so that I can start tilling all those fertile fields and get an early start on gardening. From time to time, maybe I’ll get to work up a heady sweat by moving rocks as big as the biggest boulders I’ve ever moved in my whole life.

After the gardening and the dusting, maybe I can work in the bakery for a few hours a day. I’ll be sure to bring along a little jar of my sourdough starter, grown from spores back home on my mountaintop in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. And, for good measure, I’ll bring extra copies of “Oh, No! Sourdough!” for folks who just want to sit around all day, reading.

As for me, one thing’s for sure. I won’t be sitting around, and I won’t be sitting down. Whenever I reach my home in whatever world is yet to come, I’ll be smackdab at the head of the line, looking for work, because my joy in living is upgirded by my joy in working, now and forever.