Of Puddles and Lakes and Oceans

Yesterday's puddles are today's lakes. Sheets of water, pure and clean, sit on vast areas of gravel. The garage floor is covered. As is that in the potting shed. There is a sheet of water in the dog's run and inch deep in the middle and 8 feet wide. The paint on the run, covered in dust last week shines brightly green despite the grey white sky that hangs above us, cowing everything. The rope that hangs from a cross member and that the girls exercise on drips permanently today.

Rain, incessant, constant, continual, unabating, interminable, endless, unending, never-ending, everlasting, eternal, perpetual, continuous, nonstop, around/round-the-clock, uninterrupted, unbroken, unremitting, persistent, relentless, unrelenting, unrelieved, overwhelming, overpowering, compelling, compulsive, irrepressible, ungovernable, besetting; unavoidable, inexorable, unpreventable, inescapable, driving, potent, forceful, urgent, imperative; obsessive.

Everything is saturated now. Nothing outside can absorb any more rain water. Not the soil. Not the woodwork. Nothing. The rain has even begun to creep indoors, under doors. There is a puddle just inside the front door. The front door that sits halfway down the slope of the valley. The valley that pushes or drags the rainwater that would runs past us if it could and into the river at the bottom of the garden. But now, it tries to run through us.

In summer it is the heat and sun that punishes. In winter the rain. The weather can be barbarous. It has a majesty: like the mountains behind us and the sea before us. Nature will not be tamed. Cannot be ignored. We must respect and sometimes fear it. We are puny in the face of it. It gives us a magnificent sense of our own insignificance.

But, this rain will end, as does the blistering heat in summer, and between them they are what makes this place what it is.