Rain

The weather report claimed 73% chance of rain this morning until early afternoon, then again in the evening, but it is hardly a drizzle as I begin this, not my kind of rain at all.  On a morning when I can stay in bed a bit longer, reading until some inspiration flies in to do something other (like this), a more definite downfall is a preferable excuse for lying in.

Perhaps, I think now, if I keep typing, it will gain strength, drop from the patio umbrella at more regular and frequent intervals, and show itself cleverer on the glass tops of the small iron tables I have set between chairs outside the umbrella's reach.

The roses, just budding into color now, would certainly appreciate it after the drying (lovely bright) two or three days past.

In a way, I wish this spring would not rush on so.  Though we are in stay-at-home mode, the days seem perversely to whiz by.  I hardly noticed the azaleas bloom before they began to wilt.
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In fact, the daffodils were still holding up in the shady places when the elegant royal irises down along the waterbed opened all at once.  I don't believe I ever saw a tulip closed...the ones I came upon a month ago were Joseph's, from his trip to Holland, their scarlet and gold petals already bending backward toward their fall.

The large, bulbous irises I planted a few years ago, white mostly, held their own for a while, proudly, and briefly I caught the one whose color I call young cabernet.  But I missed seeing the dark, nearly black few under the tulip poplar that defines our yard from the one behind it.

Defines is probably too definite a word for our back lot line.  I had a surveyor draw it out, it's so irregular in places...taking a 6-foot slice off the back neighbor's macadam driveway, in fact, though our gardening has taken up a good slice of another (long-deceased and so far uninherited) neighbor's plot of land to the west.  Soon after I moved in, I had to have taken down a secretly, but dangerously, eroded huge sugar maple (how sad I was) and planted pots of flowers on the decay-carved stump, then spread out from there into the newly opened sun to put down a path and other things.  Some time after that, I found out it wasn't actually my tree.  But the holding bank in Virginia hasn't ever written to correct my misplaced efforts.  Since then, Joseph has added his compost bin, and removed a plant or two that needed more attention than no-man's land could give it.

All's fair in root and rain, one could say.

Well, I'm sorry to say that the drops from the umbrella have nearly ceased, and barely a leaf of the roses is bending.  The birds have come back out of shelter to chirp orders for the day. I suppose that means it's time for me to go do something useful. 

Be well, all.