What the Rain Brings

A muskrat enjoying the stream's high levels - much lower than it was during the flood.

It’s been raining like mad here lately and when it does that, I feel like I’m back in the Pacific Northwest rather than in Minnesota. I find myself thinking about ferry boats. About arks and Noah. About the immeasurable (and unlauded) patience of his wife.

 
I look out the window every 20 minutes, unable to tear myself away from the spectacle taking place in the back yard: the stream is creeping across the grass, devouring the asparagus with muddy, cold fingers, forcing the beavers from their dam and the children from their playhouse . The normally passive, unimpressive stream is now a multi-dimensional river, rushing into Iowa with my hard-won vegetables in its clutches.

 
I wear my pink, polka-dotted rain boots when I go outside, and I measure the rain in our clear plastic rain gauge (with large yellow writing for hard-of-seeing eyes). We bought a rain gauge within a month of moving to the country, because we learned quickly that, “How much rain did you get?” was a question as important as, “How ‘bout them Vikings?” (Which, by the way, is a question I have no opinion on…but if you ask me about the Oregon Ducks, I’ll have a few thoughts to share!) So, in order to fit in, we bought the gauge and entered the competitive world of “Rainfall Measurement” which, though it does not qualify as an Olympic sport, really ought to for the sheer excitement of it all.

 
For example, did you know that someone half a mile away can get, say, half an inch more than you? (Ahhh, the agony of defeat!) Or that water left in a gauge when it’s below freezing will crack the plastic? (I thought it would expand UPWARDS if it froze. It doesn’t. It expands OUTWARDS. Like I implied last week, I’m no scientist.) When I went back to the hardware store to buy a new one, I bought the “Giant-Number, Extra-tall, Super-Neon, Number-one-Winner Rain Gauge”. It was what my trainer said I should get.

 
I live for rainfall now.

 
I even have a CD called “Summer Storm”…for the off-season. But the truth of the matter is, rain makes me feel like I’m back home on Orcas Island, in Washington State. Which, while it hasn’t been home for 26 years, still stirs those comfort-endorphins in my body at the very thought of it. Yes, rain makes me feel cozy.

 
Except when it makes me feel wet.

 
And in those times, when rain is nothing more than an annoyance, and all my Olympic Rain Gauge training is for naught; when I can’t see pictures in the clouds because there’s just too darn many of them…those are the days when Lucy and I find pictures BETWEEN the clouds. Pictures in the blue.

 
Maybe, if we’re lucky, it will become an Olympic Sport.

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