Green Glad.

We're working on fifteen or sixteen days since any kind of significant rainfall, and that third of an inch was the first of its kind for the previous ten or twelve days, so it's a tale of two summers, friends and fans of it being potato-chip dry out there: there was the biblical mudpit that was the front half of June, and there is now this, the thirty days since then.

I confess. I've seen the current radar. Something is trying to come out here and rain me out of my late-evening plan to sit fieldside, in lawn chairs, out at the Burlingtons. You know what, though? I can have me a cool beverage here on the front porch and be just as happy. If it rains, in fact, today will have been some kind of trifecta of deep and abiding joy: there will have been the new pages out in the spidering shed, there will have been the successfully-fixed window through which AMR attempted to send the ladder earlier this week, and there will have been the rain. And two out of three ain't bad, but without the third, there will be only my happily baseballed self and the dried-out gasping sad wilting front-yard full-sun petunias. So it comes to this: we have reached that point in the summer—and we always, always reach this point in the summer—where I'll see damn near anything rained out, if I can just see some rain.

Still: Last night I walked the dog, right around sunset, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and I was not hot or sad.

And still: There is this—a green gladiola—in our front yard.


Still: Rain, please.