Since rain has been scarce here in the last year, today is a day for being happy to see ‘too much’ of it–it’s pouring out here. Texas style. And what, pray tell, is Texas style? If you haven’t already heard, Texans pride themselves on everything they have or do being big, bigger, biggest, and the weather is no exception: when it’s hot and dry, let’s just git on out there and set all time records, like last year’s string of almost unbroken triple-digit temperatures that exceeded all previous years’ totals. That, of course, is hard to maintain with an accompaniment of rain, so the skies simply curled up into an impenetrable ball like a li’l ol’ armadillo and gave up nary a drop of water until the whole state finally retreated into official drought. Our county was the last to comply, being somewhat feisty and all, but we finally dried up too like last year’s roses.

So today’s pelting, while it won’t miraculously restore the lake levels and revive the dead trees, goes a long way toward soothing shriveled spirits. It will, of course, drown some of the poor little sprouts that fought their way to life after the heat relented, and that’s just the way things go in a land of thorny mesquites and tough hombres. So far we haven’t had to build an ark, and that’s a pretty good tradeoff as these Texas-sized weather happenings go. So today I’ll leave you with a little photo-essay and a link to a bit of YouTube rainy-day fun I posted last year, with a little help from my good friends Joe and Eddie.

The view from the kitchen is decidedly watery today! Hurray!

No worries about whether the little seed tray I prepped yesterday (sitting on the farther chair) will get watered . . .

Maybe I should consider installing a koi pond at the foot of the patio steps . . . "Just Add Fish" . . .

*Now* do you know what I mean by "eavesdropping"? Doesn't really matter if the gutters are clean or not; when it rains around here, they can't keep up with the rivers coming off the roof, so we just have Instant Water Features all 'round the perimeter of the house . . .

. . . and who doesn't like the soothing sound of a lovely waterfall?

From the shelter of the front porch, there are new "waterfront" views of ponds, rivers, small lakes and more cataracts showering off the roof . . .

I suppose the Texas Sage babies I picked up at the nursery yesterday won't drown, at least, because I hadn't set them in the ground yet, so they're still safely raised up in their pots for now . . .

. . . the little coreopsis I'd nursed through the winter indoors, however, is tucked in and now inundated. We'll see how that fares, never mind the rainbow chard sprouts (microcsopic green specks in the upper right of the photo)--I hope they turn out to be aquatic plants!

So this is how it goes here. Dry as a bone for months on end, and then an outpouring so generous that it might well cause new mutations of several plant species into amphibious forms in one fell swoop. I hadn’t realized we were moving to drought-and-monsoon country, but here we are. The slope of our property has definite ideas about where the water should go, and ultimately it does head for the little rivulet in the ravine behind the backyard, but in the meantime, I do think that directing the flow a bit on our actual lot will go a long way toward making the yard happier, if I can do it right. I was considering a moat around the house, since that’s the level spot where the water from up on the road naturally settles before wandering down-slope again, but I’m afraid the alligators I kept in there would eat too many of the neighborhood pets–or the neighbors–and that just wouldn’t be very sociable of me I suppose.

So I suspect a wiser thing might be to terrace a bit, put in some raised beds, and amend the living daylights out of the impermeable, gluey clay earth here, for starters. In the meantime, I’ll just say that it’s a good sump test for the property to tell me where the natural flow patterns and self-designed ponds like to go and see where it all leads. Good thing I got me some nice, tall, silly polka-dotted, ultra-waterproof gumboots. ‘Cause it’s rainin’ like nobody’s bidness out they-ah.