Rain unexpected

[neverspent]

Yesterday, I learned that we had had 3 percent of our normal rainfall for June -- it added up to less than a tenth of an inch, which to me might as well not be counted. In that case, it had been over a month since it rained. It really starts to wear on the soul, the unbroken brightness and hot skies, the dust, the smells that never get washed away, the plants fighting to survive. As we prepared to enter July, which is more rightfully our drier season, I was preparing myself for another two months without rain.

But this morning, clouds gathered -- I doubted, having been disappointed so often -- but they continued to gather and darken and eventually they broke. Glorious. Such an unexpected blessing. I walked in the rain as much as I could and smiled a lot for the rest of the day. Oh, rain! Absence makes the heart and the earth grow needy, and our need was met a little today.



The goldfish zipped around as raindrops plonked into their pool, and I returned home to find all my flowers bowed, shiny and dripping.

Comments

[shinsetsu]

Cute little goldfish!

[neverspent]

They really are cute! It was fun to see them having fun, or so I interpreted it. :)

[phoenix64]

Ooh, it's usually fun to watch fish enjoying rain like that. I'm glad you got some! Have you been having wildfire issues at all, or is that less of a problem there?

[neverspent]

The fish really seemed like they were having fun. :)

There have been more grass fires than usual, and driving to and from the farm I have seen some blackened areas beside the roads. Half the counties in the state are under burn bans, and I heard today that a total of 1400 acres of woodland have burned in over 100 separate fires. Around here, if there were a huge, widespread fire like the ones on TV, it would be a forest fire, because that's where all the fuel is. (We don't have brushy mountains or grasslands like out West.) There's never been one in my lifetime, and I think some of that may be down to the controlled burns the forest service does, but we also haven't had any major tree diseases leaving large swaths of forest vulnerable. And while the droughts have definitely affected farmers, they haven't been so long or bad enough to start killing off a lot of trees. ::crosses fingers::