Arabella's Garden -- The View From Home: Rain in the desert

It is raining today. Not a summer thunderstorm. Not a misty desert drizzle. A really basic, settle-down-and-rain kind of rain, something we get only once or twice a year. Certainly not in August, in the normal cycle of the seasons. But this year has been off-the-charts nutty, starting with the winter that never ended but morphed without preamble into a long, soggy, Willamette Valley-style 'spring' and then continued (winter) all through June (frost!), and reluctantly turned into summer only in July. This is fall weather -- does it mean our summer is over? Hey weather dudes, this is simply not on!

Still, the sound of rain is always lovely to me. Except for my college years, spent in the redwood jungle of northern California, I have always lived in dry climate zones: from Mediterranean to High Desert. I've traveled a bit in the MidWest in summer and can't say I could ever live in that kind of humidity. So the sound, smell and sight of rain is welcome to me, always.

The kitties are disgusted and have settled happily into warm nooks indoors. The chickens are having an indoor 'time out'. My girl Betty has laid an egg a day (with one day off) since she started laying on my birthday. Hawkeye, my Ameraucana, laid her first (green) egg yesterday, alas, on the floor of the henhouse rather than in a nice nest box. But still, it shows a proper spirit of henliness. Nothing so far today, but it's a start. As for the other girls -- ahem, ladies -- can you read my lips? can you say ' we are slackers'? I'm hoping that spending a day inside, staring at Betty's latest effort, will inspire everyone else to get with the program.

I have a lot of indoor jobs I could be doing. Phone calls. Lesson planning for the upcoming year of piano teaching.

Or I could look through some of the books I recently checked out of the library for inspiration in designing a new garden border.