Rain

“That blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened.”
- William Wordsworth

Rain.

I managed to cut some herbs before the rains came. Forecasters are saying that by the time the third storm moves through So Cal by the end of this wet week, we could get up to 20 inches of rain. So, you might be asking yourself, what’s a little winter rain? In a place where we’ve had so little rain for so long, we tend to over-react when it rains for more than a few hours at a time. Monday’s storm caused Disneyland to close early for goodness sake! Besides, generally speaking, Southern Californians collective skill level in driving in the rain is approximately that of a bus full of rodeo clowns trying to perform brain surgery while the bus tries to outrun the pursuing border patrol. Besides, I’m not even sure where the windshield wiper control is on my five-year old car.

I remember once when I worked in the Ivory Towers of Academia, the entire university closed early due to rain. I had to stay behind because I was in a car pool driven that day by a guy whose job became more critical in bad weather. I answered the phone and spoke to a contractor in Washington DC who thought I was kidding when I told him the entire university was closed due to rain.

Now, the real reason the university let us go home early was that storm drains – unused for years and clogged with debris – were overwhelmed and flooding was endemic; and that the university had thousands of workers who would only make the evening commute more hellacious if we waited until winter’s early darkness to hit the roads.

But I didn’t mention this to the caller. Instead, I explained that the only reason I picked up the phone was that I was still waiting for the cab I had called to pick me up at the door of my building and drive me to my car in the parking lot a block away. I said nobody here owned umbrellas because it never rained, and that we all wore clothing was “dry clean only”, and that I’d just had my hair done and didn’t want to get it wet.

This, of course, confirmed all his latent prejudices about us vain and shallow phonies living in the shadow of Hollywood. It also got me out of doing any serious business with the jerk, so it was a win-win.

Rain, dammit!

“And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.”

- Edward Thomas, Sowing

The rain is coming. Not yet, but soon. The bird feeders are dry and filled to their brims yesterday, already half full. Before the rain, I have to give everybody a drink of water (there’s no such thing as a gentle “soak”) so the ground softens enough to open and drink when the rains finally arrive. If I don’t gently hand-water a bit first, the first rain just makes the surface of the dry dust damp. The first water to fall from the sky rolls off my dry yard like a duck’s back, right down the storm drains.

So I go outside to water before it rains. The birds resentfully quit the bird feeders at my approach. Some of them are too fat to stand on the dainty feeders and, like the plump morning doves (aka, hobo chicken) who are content to forage on the ground below the feeders. The wren pictured here is actually too obese to feed from the hanging feeders . The morning doves also waddle around, sorting through the sunflower hulls for any dropped seeds.

In early spring rains, the seeds who have escaped the birds begin to sprout. I’ve sometimes managed to transplant the fragile sprouts into a sunnier spots where they survive and prosper. I’ve never had much luck buying sunflower seeds and attempting to cultivate real live sunflowers. Which is a shame, because I love sunflowers. Big, gaudy, and vulgar like their humble beginnings as subsistence food for poor farmers. Now the darlings of the Farmers’ Markets, the icon of the Art Nouveau which was beginning to fade and be eclipsed by Art Deco about 100 years ago. I insist that I liked sunflowers when I was poor, before they became trendy and sustainable and green and junk.

Some day, I will stumble my way into the perfect combination of sun, soil and rare rain to cultivate wildly successful sunflowers. My timing is also probably off, a sad metaphor for my gardening skills in general. I am the Almost Gardener, who may insist on not remembering all the right botanical names, but I garden for love and for physical and mental therapy, and probably enjoy it all the more because it relives me of my obsessive need to name what I see.

But someday, I will grow sunflowers deliberately. Meanwhile, my yard is overrun and run amok with mint: the perfect barometer of my measure of care in the yard. I practice gardening like a clinical drug trial doing the LD50 phase. This means the dose at which 50% of the patients die. I probably am doing better than 50-50 these days, but it was not always so.

One day, I will all arrive at the exact right time and deliver the exact right dose of all the ingredients needed to grow monster sunflowers. But first, let’s have some rain, dammit!

Vacation

And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.

- Edward Thomas Sowing

It rained last night! I'm off for 2 weeks.

Rainy Day Thoughts

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
As if my Brain had split--
I tried to match it--Seam by Seam--
But could not make them fit.

“The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before--
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls--upon a Floor.”

Emily Dickinson, The Lost Thought

I’ve heard of balls to the wall, but I’ve never heard of anybody feeling like balls upon a floor. Well, maybe close – I sometimes feel more like those loose balls of dust that gather themselves into corners neglected by the mop – almost, but not quite, coherently ball-like. Would balloid describe that in-between state? Is that what Emily meant?

It’s rained heavily the past few days. The other night, when warning about the coming storm, the weather dude explained we’d have over 8 inches of rain so far (for the year that begins 7/1/08, but wherein the rain doesn’t fall until January), and that the average by this date is only six inches. He reminds us, as we sit before a toasty fire, we’re still in a drought.

If there was a webcam in my yard, it would be obscured by the green shade-cloth that has come unhooked and is flapping in the strong gusty wind. It’s also cold outside – in the 50F range. I know, that’s not something most people would consider cold, but to those of us who have acclimated to So Cal, it’s winter if it’s necessary to actually wear a coat when you go outside.

Days like these are good days to get lost in thought - as opposed to lost from thought.

Crazy Salad

"It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone."

William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter

At the most primal level, a garden is a refuge from the world. It’s the place where Man meets Nature, and where all the first and endlessly variable and complex relations between the two begin. The Garden of Eden however, was not such a place. In Eden, everything was perfect and unchanging. Since the fall, in earthly gardens, man contends with the endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth. Perfection, if it’s ever reached, lasts mere moments in a garden. A flower at the moment of it’s most lovely bloom, is lovely precisely because we recognize that like all that lives, it will die.

Anyway, I’m not so sure I like the idea of a heaven in the hereafter being a perfect and unchanging garden. Immortal gardens would, I think, lose something vital if they didn’t embody the energy of what we call the Cycle of Frickin’ Life. Winter rain is as much-appreciated part of this cycle. We actually had some hail during a particularly hard rain the other day. - you can see it on the ground in the top picture. In the second picture, Lily is checking out this view from the safety and warmth of the love seat in the living room.

In front of the stone lantern, are the two thin stalks of the red-trunked, green-leaf Japanese maple. In the background, to the right of the old olive tree, you can see the bare branches of the red-leaved Japanese maple, silhouetted in the wet driveway beyond. These trees, including a third out of the picture, were moved from the tsukubai garden in the back yard where the two older trees had staggered through harsh dry summers for about ten years, and were on the point of giving up. Japanese maples are one of the inappropriate plants I insist on keeping alive in my yard against all odds. I’ve given up on lilacs, lilies of the valley and most violets. But I insist that these trees occupy a position of respect in the crazy salad of my garden.


The horn of plenty Yeats is talking about is the myth of the cornucopia, that overflowed with whatever the holder wanted. For example, imagine if you will, an endless abundance of cheesy-poofs as you sat by the fire watching old movies on TV. Then, if you wished for linoleum in a green and white pattern, the cornucopia would presumably provide enough to replace the stained living room carpet, including extra to allow for measuring and cutting mistakes. Is Yeats saying that wishing for such a crazy salad would cause the horn to malfunction? Would it perhaps spit out some malformed green and white cheesey poofs, or cheese-flavored floor tiles? Is he saying women in particular are inclined to prefer such a crazy salad in their lives? Is he saying it’s ok for me to try to cultivate Japanese maples in the harsh Zone 9 climate?

Even if he thinks this would be crazy, he refers to such ladies as “fine women” and that is how I chose to interpret his letter to his daughter. He’s saying, be sure to eat your meat, but also to enjoy your own personal crazy salad, and accept the imperfection and mortality of your garden. Good advice.

Advice from a Lousy Gardener

“Lunar fluctuations affect Earth’s magnetic field, and its atmosphere, causing all water, including that in even the smallest living organism, to move in almost tidal fashion. This makes significant rainfall statistically more likely after a new moon.”
Duncan Crosbie, “Tips from the Old Gardeners”

Dear LG,
Something strange is going on outside. Last night, everything in my yard got wet. I have adjusted the automatic sprinklers so that only the most precious potted plants receive daily water. But last night, water just appeared everywhere. It was almost as if it was falling out of the sky. What gives?
Drought Gardener

Dear DG
Your senses did not deceive you. Water did indeed, fall from the sky yesterday. This unusual phenomenon is one of Mother Nature’s magic tricks. You know what snow is, right? When the temperature outdoors is too high for snow to remain frozen and white, it melts. This melting falling liquid snow is also known as “rain”. Neither you, nor your garden, has anything to fear from rain unless you are related to the Wicked Witch of the North and live in Oz.
LG

Advice

March came in like a lion for most of U.S, and we’re even getting our share of rain here in Southern California. It's sunny today, but cold. Last year at this time, I was out in the sunny yard with my Spring seeds and peat pots, imagining flowers.

Spending this morning indoors while considering the extremes of March weather, I came upon a thought that makes a similar comparison about different ways to give and receive advice.

“A man takes contradiction and advice much more easily than people think, only he will not bear it when violently given, even though it be well founded. Hearts are flowers; they remain open to the softly falling dew, but shut up in the violent downpour of rain.”
Johann Paul Richter