Rain, Rain Don’t Go Away. Again.

It’s raining right now. Ordinarily I wouldn’t consider that an earth-shattering enough statement to post on my blog, but at the moment it really is.

It rained only once in my area through June and July, but for some reason it skipped my yard. A few blocks away it poured for a short time, but all my house got was what felt like a little warm spittle. It was like the joke about having the storm cloud following over your head, but the opposite, when—irony of ironies—that storm cloud would make you so very happy.

The lawn hasn’t been mown all summer. My grass is as brown as an African savanna. When I just thought it was dormant, I was perfectly okay with that.  Now I think it's just truly dead.  More irony:  my grass may have gone to greener pastures. The lush plantain lilies, usually cool-elegant as a southern belle this time of year, have curled into fried pork rinds.

For a while I turned my blog blue. The color of Arctic ice. Of shadows on snow. Of cold, predawn light. Of the breeze I imagine runs a hand over lavender fields in Provence. But then it got even hotter and drier, and blue started to look hot again. It was the color of that ceaseless sky that sizzles clouds off like a blue flame. It’s the distant lightning, blue and electric and ominous, that tormented us all summer with distant growls and threatened to burn us all to cinder, but rolled on.

This free water that falls from the sky from shivery-silver clouds is now an exotic thing. Guess that’s one of the true gifts of aging. I've learned to take nothing for granted, ever.

Simplify, simplify…We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without. ~Henry David Thoreau