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A hard rain a'fallin'
By
Nancy McClure
"Rain does not cancel."
Not good words to recall at 8 am on Saturday, my morning of commitment to help plant 70+ street trees in a hilly SF neighborhood. Not good words because it was (raining) and they weren't (cancelling). You can't cancel many coordinated volunteer truckloads of tree delivery, assembled tool groupings (2 spade head shovels, 1 flat head shovel, 2 hammers, 1 stake sleeve-hammer (an ingenious yet unforgiving tool), 1 bag of nails, tree ties, wooden slat braces) and a visiting group of Idahoian socialwork grad students doing their 'community volunteerism' field research.
And so we bundled up, donned a vast variety of rain-gear (slickers for some, modified trashbags for others) and received our planting orders: for my team, it was to transplant 3 magnolias, 3 jacarandas, and a flowering cherry tree. That's 7 holes to dig, 21 8-10' hardwood stakes to laboriously pound into the ground, and a total of 105 nails to hammer. Fortunately, between 4 people.
As we dug into the assigned sidewalk cuts, the dirt wet and heavy, the rain fell: wetter and heavier. So heavy, in fact, that our tree wells began to fill with water - both from the now-downpour pummelling upon us, and from the surrounding ground. How could we have hit the water table while digging ON A HILL? None of us knew. But there it was, a clay soup. We took turns ladling out the water with the shovels, while measuring for depth against our nursery pots. And we pondered - would we drown these fledgling trees by immersing them, rootball and all, into such muck? Knee deep into the sludge, we started worrying more about drowning ourselves.
Seriously, it NEVER rains that hard in SF. Except for that morning, while a handful of ill-prepared volunteers froze their patooties off, but still joked and laughed and muddied themselves beyond recognition (my cuticles are still orange from the dye leeched out from my leather work gloves!).
And this is why I volunteer. In part because of the actual good that it does, for my community and (in this particular case) for the environment, but also because it does such good FOR ME - to remind myself that people are essentially good. That they WILL go out of their way, out of their comfort zone for the 'greater good', despite the increasing frequency of shoot-outs, suicide-runs, and other blasphemies slathered across the news.
As long as I still see evidence of the good that people do - willingly, freely - I have faith. In us. And while, in these dark times, there may be a hard rain a'fallin', in the end, I long to believe that our collective goodwill will not be cancelled.
Copyright © 2007 Nancy McClure
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