A break in the drought?

If rainfall can be sparse, that's what's falling as this is written. We have scattered showers with scattered raindrops for the afternoon forecast. At this point in the summer, some is better than none. Maybe the bee balm and the apple tree won't need hand watering today. Now, the question becomes, after a droughtful summer, will autumn get spoiled by excess precipitation that will accomplish little to compensate for summer's dryness? It's beginning to look like there's no "normal" to our new normal weather and our broken climate.

rain clouds? or just clouds?

Photo by J. Harrington

I hope any showers are rain only, not thunderstorms, since there are errands to be run this afternoon, including picking up our Community Supported Agriculture [CSA] share, and one of the dogs, my SiSi, gets really nervous when it thunders and there's no one around to hold her paw.

As we've been driving the back roads the past few days, we've noticed several whitetail bucks with nice racks in velvet. Sandhill cranes are beginning  to form larger flocks in anticipation of autumn's migration. One  field of soybeans we drove past had a group of a dozen or so plus another group of something like two dozen birds. Parents are teaching sandhill colts to fly and to hunt for food. The  crane colts are growing larger and stronger. Whitetail fawns are also growing and will soon have fading spots. We find joy in living where there's relatively abundant wildlife, even if some of them exhibit destructive nuisance behaviors. [I'm talking about the deer that ate, and killed, a couple of our chokeberry bushes and the gophers that ate the roots of most of the trees we've planted.]

Rain

By Peter Everwine

Toward evening, as the light failed

and the pear tree at my window darkened,

I put down my book and stood at the open door,

the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,

a smell of wet clay in the wind.

Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,

half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain

drummed against our tent, I heard

for the first time a loon’s sudden wail

drifting across that remote lake—

a loneliness like no other,

though what I heard as inconsolable

may have been only the sound of something

untamed and nameless

singing itself to the wilderness around it

and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father

and of good companions gone

into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain

and the soft lapping of water, and did not know

whether it was grief or joy or something other

that surged against my heart

and held me listening there so long and late.

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