“Some people walk in rain, others just get wet.”
Roger Miller
Large green circles surrounded the Prairie house like polka-dots where the circular sprinklers struggled to maintain the lawn.
Even watering the potted plants up to twice a day is a losing battle. There are days I wonder if it’s worth the trouble, ’til I think of the geranium rooted from a single bloom, the small house plant that’s almost a tree and the bougainvillea Allene gave me. And there’s Nick’s heirloom airplane plants and Swedish ivy. And so I fill the recycled milk jugs with well water while continuing to pray for rain, any rain; even a sprinkle would help.
My two sources of tomatoes report their tomatoes have dried up or been eaten by deer. They were such juicy tomatoes. One slice filled a sandwich, and the taste was as sweet as an apple. There were yellow crook-neck squash and zucchini and some cucumbers. We still have a basketful but dole them out carefully.
Our neighbor, Robin, drove over to West Point where a thunderstorm descended, covering about a 2-mile stretch, when it suddenly stopped as if there were a “do not cross this line” sign. We heard parts of Columbus got rain, but our Prairie had none.
Down the road and over in the back fields farmers grow soybeans, cotton and corn. It’s a regular sight to see irrigation watering the corn, drawn from a Prairie pond whose boundaries are shrinking. Great egrets stalk the mud flats.
The pear tree is bountiful with small pears. They are a treat to all the critters. A fox squirrel scampers with a pear in its mouth as big as his head. Sam saw a dainty fox, something we haven’t seen for a long time, tip away with his pear. Sometimes midday we’ve seen three nice does eating pears. They have even pulled down some heavily laden limbs to eat pears along with the leaves. The half-eaten pears left behind I feed to the bunny rabbits that are grateful for the juicy sweets.
I wondered if we were really in a drought so I looked it up on the official Drought Monitor.
The U.S. Drought Monitor at www.droughtmonitor.unl.edu is produced through a partnership among the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The Drought Monitor predicts trends and reports rainfall for the United States by region and also by states. Two of the measuring scales are impact and intensity. Though it seems terribly dry here in the Prairie, we are currently classified as experiencing a short-term drought, the duration being less than six months. Our intensity is labeled between abnormally dry to moderate drought. So it’s not as bad as it seems.
As I pondered our drought situation, Sam hollered, “A thunderstorm is coming!”
As quick as lightning amid a blue sky there was a thunderous roar. Wind whipped the trees in a frenzy, and rain poured. For just a moment, all were refreshed.
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