Alexa, what’s the weather?

I woke up this morning to very heavy rain. Have you ever caught yourself sitting in your living room or lying on your bed early in the morning and saying, “Alexa, is it raining?”  Have you ever heard Alexa respond, “it’s pouring you dimwit, just look out the window!” Oftentimes, that’s what we do.  We ask Alexa, or Google, questions that we either should know the answer to or could easily find out by, in the case of rain, pulling up the blinds and looking out the window.  Sometimes, you could simply ask whoever is sitting next to you, like your wife. 

Recently my wife told me something that I did not need her to tell me, for me to know.  The details are not important.  What is important is that I should have seen what she was saying even before she said it.  What she said should not have been a revelation.  I should have seen for myself what was happening.  I should have pulled up the blinds!

Now, staying with the rain metaphor, what was happening with my wife was a little rain, at least from my perspective.  But as we have seen so often, especially lately, a little rain can become heavy rain, and heavy rain can lead to flooding, property damage, and even loss of life.  In other words, tragedy, and disaster.  And to think that it all started with just a few drops of rain! 

In my case, I realized that my wife had seen the raindrops and, while they were just raindrops to me, she worried that if I did not do something about it, it soon could be pouring.  Now, I do not need Alexa or Google to tell me what that means.  I know what pouring rain means, but I was refusing to pull up the blinds and see for myself.  I also was not seeing that while it was just a little rain now, well, you get the picture. 

The rest of the story involving my wife?  Crickets…