Don’t read this if you can see sunshine. Cast this newspaper aside and get outside.

Weather forecasters call for “several hours of sun” today in Down East Maine, so don’t for one minute settle for the black and white of newsprint when you can rush outdoors this instant and experience the John Denver “sunshine on your shoulders” you haven’t seen for weeks.

Weeks of record-breaking rainfall has flooded your culverts, washed out your roads, overextended your sump pumps, saturated your golf courses and totally invalidated your May tourism ticket.

Certainly, don’t stay inside to read a column you’ve already read.

Particularly one that goes back two years, when there was a myth of a “Maine drought,” brought on by previous conditions hard to comprehend.

Back in ’03, there was far too much hype about perceived drought when the winter had dumped more snow than residents had seen for years, snow that fell through April, to be replaced by rain … continuously through May.

Yep, in this same column two years ago, we lamented those conditions: “Water is everywhere, rushing as streams through woodland swaths to the shore, standing in pools between boulders, filling crevices in ledges, swelling ditches and potholes along muddy roads. Down East temperatures have hovered in the 40s for so long we just naturally light a fire every evening just as we wrap up in a fleece pullover most every day. Though the calendar claims May is almost over, the apple trees haven’t blossomed.”

This very week last year – when Memorial Day services concluded and Mainers said goodbye to spring and hello to summer – we wrote: “Day by day during May we kept scratching on bark to see if something green shown underneath. We kept waiting for sunshine to entice the apple blossoms. We kept waiting to fling open the windows and turn off the furnace.

“We, along the ‘cooler-and cloudier-coast,’ as the weather predictors are prone to say, have been waiting for May to be out … and June to be in.”

This beginning of June, we are close to throwing in the towel, except it’s too heavy and wet to throw. We believe in the theory of global warming … globally, definitely not here.

For nearly three weeks the entire region has been drenched with rain – one phase of which was a continuous drizzle that mildewed store awnings, the next a torrential downpour resembling southern states’ gully-washers.

Any way you look at it, Mainers have grumpily endured a tough winter, weather-wise. But an unbelievably inclement spring has made “soggy-bottom boys” of all of us “oh, brothers,” singing our own chain-gang songs of seasonal despair.