Itches are very much like the odd twitch or pain we experience from time to time.  They are familiar and our response is, as the rubbing of a pain, to scratch.  Some of our itches are from universally familiar bites from insects.  Everybody has them.  Moreover, everybody scratches them.  I challenge anyone to tell me that they have never scratched a mosquito bite.  But, some itches come from inside.

My itches are mostly the ideas that tumble around in my head and are expressed when I scratch them to order them into essays and then get relief when I write them down.  Others are needs to do something when lying around watching television gets me thinking that I am wasting my time and that I should be doing something creative or useful.  There are other ancient itches that impel us to seek trouble or investigate the alluring and mysterious.

I got to thinking about itches this morning as I walked out of our apartment.  I saw the dark clouds clumping into the sky across the horizon and immediately thought about the possibility of rain.  It suddenly occurred to me that there is an itch in the sky that is a response to the movement of moisture in the clouds through the air.  The storms that bring winds irritate the sky to produce some of the most magnificent scratches and these are called lightening.

There may be a number of analogies and parables here, that can illustrate what I mean. The most common story that illustrates what I mean is the one that tells of curiosity that kills the cat.  Cats act out our need to poke into every corner and weave in and out in a scheme that we cannot duplicate.  They are really curious creatures that must answer the itch to search out looking, smelling and touching with their sensitive whiskers the whole of their worlds.  We have this instinct suppressed by well-meaning parents who try to keep us from trouble and harm.

Our human problems in responding to internal itches come with puberty. Then they follow us throughout life until age or being burned once too often tells us that we have to suppress our need to constantly scratch.

I don’t know if the clouds that scud across South Florida will today itch enough to produce rain.  I do know that all of us have these itches and when we scratch them, relief doesn’t always follow. Sometimes we make the situation worse and then, look out!