Rain

I ran across these notes this morning as I was looking for something else.  I know I intended it at a blog entry but it kind of got lost...

6/22/11
I’m sitting here in the dark listening to it rain. For quite a while I have thought this would never ever happen again. We have been under a severe drought for several months and while we’ve had lots of clouds and unrelenting wind, we’ve had no rain. Summers are long and hot and dry here, at least in my experience, but not usually quite this dry. Peggy tells me she remembers showers every afternoon during the summers of her youth but that was before my time in the Houston area.
What woke me up very early this morning was the lightning. I love lightning, even growing up as I did in tornado alley in the Midwest. But lightening without thunder or rain is terrifying when you’re in the middle of a drought and it only takes the slightest spark to set off a wildfire. Peggy was watching the smoke from yet another wildfire on her drive home from work yesterday only to discover it was very near her house.  That fire was spotted quickly and contained within several hours with lots of burned grass but no buildings burned and no people injured – the best possible kind of wildfire.   The best way to handle some problems is just to worry about them. I got up to worry about the lightening and now it’s raining!
It’s just starting to get light now. I want to see my yard and pastures soggy! What a treat. The wind really is blowing the rain. This is no calm female rain but a male rain full of strength and anger. At this point, I don’t care what kind of rain it is as long as water ends up on my ground.
The power has gone off a couple of times already this morning, always popping back on immediately. That’s not good for the computer or the satellite TV system but I’ll take it as long as it means rain.   Our property is mostly sand so we don’t ever have much standing water. Usually 10 or 15 minutes is enough for all the standing water to be gone.
It’s still lightening but we have lots of thunder and lots of rain. It’s a very good morning.
7/8/11
We had a total of 4 inches of rain on the morning of Jun 22nd!  Here it is two weeks later and it's still green.  We had an additional 1 inch of rain a couple of days ago.  This time it was the standard summer rain - all was calm till the storm moved in with howling wind, driving rain and thunder and lightening.  In 20 minutes it had blown through and was gone but it left an inch of rain.  It was great!