Friday Favorites: Rain

Let me try to resuscitate my regular Friday thing here with this tribute to rain, which I love, although we have been receiving it in quantities and velocities that I find it harder to appreciate.

My favorite things about rain:

1. The smell. Of course. Although it turns out that if it rains every day and every night for a week and a half, the smell is less "fresh pine forest" than "underside of mushroom."

2. The way it makes the yard grow and grow and grow. All our plants are bounding forth from the earth, in startling abundance.

3. The sheer awesome power of a deluge. I mean, even if I am kind of horrified at how the water is pooling up and washing away (goodbye, landscaping! Goodbye, compost! Goodbye, woodchips! Goodbye, edges!), it's still one heck of a show, these afternoon storms we've been having. Every morning brings its own surprise (wow! I didn't think that the puddles would reach that high!)

4. Sitting in the house/office/car and feeling smugly appreciative of modern systems of enclosure.

5. The excuse to bring a child into bed, just like the old days. When they were smaller. And fit in the bed. This one is kind of double-edged.

6. The inexplicable way it makes the end of the world feel farther off (in contrast to drought, which makes the end of the world feel right on our doorstep).

All said, I'm still crossing my fingers that today's the day we get NO rain.

What is UP with me lately

The rain. The rain is what is up with me. I get that rain is good, that I haven't had to water the lawn in over a week and hurrah and, furthermore, it will end as all weather things do and we will go back to all dry all the time and also HOT. (Okay, we are in fact back to HOT). But: the rain messed up my weekend, and I am NOT HAPPY. Specifically, the rain made a perfectly easy and sensible project, painting (some more of) the house, suck all of the non-accounted-for time out of Sat & Sun. To wit: Sunday I woke up and prepared myself for my weekly long run, as is my wont. Except that as I was tying my shoes and otherwise puttering toward Start, I happened to get that itchy, let's-think-about-those-clouds-and-how-they-might-impact-my-plans feeling, and that feeling led to a decision to switch the order of things, from run-then-paint to pain-then-run, which was fine, except that the paint part ended up taking up all of the paint and run time...and I guess maybe what I'm really mad about is the painting.

Augh will I be glad when the painting of the house is fini. It seems like it is neverENDING.

The other reason I felt a little pressed for time on Sunday was that we had to leave after lunch to bring Si up to his first-ever overnight camp. One of his best friends is also attending (they're sharing a bunk bed, in fact), and they've got about a million fun things scheduled, from baseball to archery to rain to canoeing to campout night to rain to horseback riding, and fun counselors that actually seem focused and attentive, like they might remember his name--but I still said, as we drove away, that I was SO VERY GLAD that my own personal days of sleepover camp are over. It just...has that overtone of bleakness. The too-hot, slightly mac-and-cheese-smelling dining hall. The bare-bones cabin with the plastic mattresses. The cabins that used to be snugly nestled in a cool pine forest but now, thanks to pine beetles and blowdown, are scattered across a bare, stump-studded field.

Si was enthusiastic about it, though, or at least a good sport, and by the time we'd gone back to the car and returned with his Harry Potter book he was deep in a game with his friend and barely looked up to say goodbye. So that's all good (but I will be glad to have him home, and to have school back in session and everybody in their place and predictable while I'm at work).