Tag Archives: rain

Dampness is married to gravity.

nature, poetry,

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain,
It stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear — but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole’s tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

–Mary Oliver

We like rain on our parade.

my garden, , , ,
P1110712 giants window art
window art at the market

Two special blessings today, neither having to do with Halloween. Our baseball team the San Francisco Giants were back in town (We consider them our team though we don’t live in San Francisco) after winning the World Series in Kansas City earlier in the week; they have won the series three times in five years. Today was the parade and ceremony to celebrate and honor the team and it was also a rainy day.

ConsideringPeets roosters the drought, no one of the thousands of people in attendance seemed to mind the rain one bit. Several speakers at the ceremony mentioned it as an extra blessing and even thanked the rain as well as every human participant. Mr. Glad and I were here in our town watching some of the festivities on the computer and we left the door open to the back yard so we could hear the rain. Everything smells fresh and fallish.

It was a good day to go to Peet’s and buy some coffee beans. A flock of roosters calls that parking lot their home, and they P1110719didn’t mind the rain, either.

Earlier in the week when we were watching a World Series game that our team lost, we had son Pathfinder here to eat dinner with us, and I made an old family favorite that I thought he might like, Fiesta Corn. I’ve read recipes for this that call it Mexican Spoonbread. It’s cheesy and corny with some green chiles, and I forgot to take a picture of it cut into a slice.

zinnias pink 1 bush 14The zinnias are putting on their final show pre-frost. This one pink bush has been the biggest producer of blooms, and has converted me from my former stance against this color of zinnias. The flowers look even nicer and last longer now that they don’t have the sun beating down directly overhead. (The picture also shows a few of the gazillion redwood needles that fall in our yard from the tree over the fence day after day and demand our attention.)zinnias halloween 14

My favorite orange variety seem to really like the cooler weather; I even had enough to make an all-orange-zinnia bouquet with some sage and fennel flowers.

steppingstones 10-14As of yesterday morning I still had not prepared the soil for my new planting out front, and I knew the rain was coming and would gum up our adobe soil again for who knows how long. So I put aside all the indoor tasks and began to hack at the brick-like dirt with my shovel, hoping just to get some bags of compost mixed into the clay before the showers began last night.

I managed to do that and also to collect some odd steppingstones from here and there to heave into tentative places. I didn’t die, but before I was halfway done I was lying on my back on the crunchy former lawn berating myself for ever committing to that project in the first place. I am too old for this kind of fun!pumpkin display

 

The same market that had the Giants cheer on the window has this lovely display inside, with all things pumpkin including hard pumpkin cider, which if I had had the foresight to pick up a bottle, would be the perfect way to celebrate all of this week’s special blessings. Most of all, rain!

 

Rainyness

my garden, ,

sage & rain 9-11-14

Just hours after my last post, my prayer for rain, showers did fall on us. I knew that there had been a weatherman’s chance of that in addition to our hope. P.G., as the Irish say, Please God, there will be a dampening in those places that need it most, to retard the incendiary possibilities!

When I drew the blinds this morning, a hummingbird was feeding at the Mexican Bush Sage, but when I went to get my camera he must have gone home and got the message that it’s too wet right now for that, because he never would come back. But he will, and a passel of relations with him, because they love this sage.

I’ve been wanting to take a picture of our bush that is humongous this summer. It only came into full bloom within the last week or so, but it will keep going until Christmas and beyond. It’s a plant whose stems must be cut to the ground every winter, and then this happens! Without being irrigated, I might say. Not long ago I included it here in a list of drought-tolerant plants.

So thankful for a rainy day, even if it doesn’t register on the rain gauge. A friend is bringing Indian food for lunch today – and doesn’t that sound perfect?

sage w cross 9-11-14

surprising lavender food

food and cooking, ,

As I was enjoying my quiet and contemplative day, it was in the back of my mind that at some point I would have to get practical and find something with which to make dinner. The sort of solitude I had been enjoying precluded any kind of shopping.

I was surprised to end up lav soup 4-14with lavender soup.

This is how I did it:

Back in Butter Week, I made some yummy pasta with beans and cheese and greens, but it was too large a batch to use up before Lent, so I froze a quart of it. During Lent a purple cabbage came in my CSA box, and I have been trying to figure out what to do with it. Today I thought of making cabbage soup with sausage, but that would require me going to the store, so I looked in the freezer and discovered the pasta e fagoli, as I might call it if I were Italian. On the container I had written the suggestion “Make soup,” so I followed that plan and added some cheese sauce that I whipped up.

P1090679crp

As the concoction was simmering, I looked out at the rain falling into the swimming pool, and took a picture through the door of the miniature roses that look especially good from a distance, because you can’t see the black spot.

I didn’t anticipate that the rain would hold on and keep dripping all through dinner, meaning that soup was the perfect food to have. And lavender is very much one of those Easter egg colors so we had a Springtime experience as well. Our friend Cat ate some with Mr. Glad and me.

After we all had emptied our bowls of second helpings of the very comforting and tasty soup, Cat and I sort of visited through the glass door with a neighborhood cat who stopped by and stared at us. He had found a dry spot under my gardening bench. He doesn’t have too much to do with the rest of this post, but his eyes are also a pretty Easter egg color.

4-2014 bengal cat