After a week of pretty gray weather and a little good rain, some blue skies up there now, spotted with cotton candy clouds. We had a good downpour for several hours overnight, and the air feels clean even if it is a little thick. You never know with the weather this time of year.

This is a column about business, but you wouldn’t know it.

Some years ago, maybe fifteen I think, we hit full summer temperatures – over a hundred degrees – in the first week of May, and we had eighteen days over a hundred just in the month of May.

Then there was 2007 when the rains came in May, and never stopped. We didn’t even once hit a hundred degrees all year, and we had about forty-one inches of rain that year. Last year the storms came and interrupted the Cinco de Mayo festivities, and the same thing happened this year. We need the rain, Lake Brownwood needs the water, but… it would be nice to not have the rain hurt the Cinco festival. We can’t have everything, I suppose.

Local businesses put a lot of time, energy, and money into setting up downtown in what should be a very busy and successful opportunity. But sometimes things don’t work out. Sometimes the weather intervenes.

Living off-grid, the thing about rain is that you never know if (or when) you’ll get it. We didn’t have a water well, so we relied 100% on water catchment. Every rooftop should catch water and direct it into storage. We built a 3500-gallon underground cistern, and we did it by hand. Water is precious and we needed to harvest it whenever it rained.

The point is that we relied on that beautiful grace, the gift of rain. When the cistern and all our storage tanks were full, we felt like we could face anything if need be. When it didn’t rain once for 10 months, we wondered if we would even be able to make it on the land. We were down near the bottom of the cistern.

Small businesses experience this as well. The holiday seasons are usually good. And the occasional special day or festival can help. The cisterns fill up (or at least they hold steady!) When the weather intervenes, it gets scary.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone thought something like… Those businesses invested time and money and now they probably took a loss. Let’s go downtown sometime this month and spend some of the money we might have spent during Cinco de Mayo.

We can still help them keep water in the cistern.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.