Cross Blogging

I am pilfering from myself this morning - this is a post I wrote for my even-more-neglected-than-the-garden-it-is-about-blog, Gardenista. Rather than insist anybody go one place or the other I decided to rob Peter to pay Paul and post this entry both places. Hope you will pardon the indulgence and more than that, hope you enjoy the post.

We had that lovely three inch rain recently, and cooler temperatures to go with, but then the weather began to snap back into a disturbingly familiar pattern.

Warm by mid morning, hot by early afternoon, no rain in the forecast and despite the promise of a cooler wetter Fall, we all had become too well acquainted with heat and drought to quite buy the hopeful promise of "wet stuff to come". Jaded, we'd already spent weeks that turned into months with no rain or relief from triple digits here in Central Texas.

I had wearily resigned myself to more conversations about how if this does not change, people are considering packing it up and moving. Carrying the weight of The Potential For Hot and Dry Forever and Ever, Amen, as the temperatures climbed, all our heads were hanging a little lower, our steps slowed, hand shaded eyes warily surveying the skies.

But then it happened. Woken last night by a quick flash of lightning, thunder delayed just to the point of having stopped counting "Mississipi"s, and there, did you hear that?

The gently insistent whisper of rain hitting the roof, water flowing from gutters into barrels, all disturbing only the lightest of sleepers.

This morning, when we woke up, the Hub checked his schedule to discover he didn't have to be anywhere at any particular time. It was 65 degrees outside and our gauge was working on catching a third inch.

And so it was decided. Today would be a day to have a sit down breakfast. In the morning.

This might not strike you as particularly earth shattering but around this house we long ago abandoned the idea of any sort of a meal in the morning. Common wisdom be damned, after years of abrupt starts to the day we became "just coffee" in the morning people, and although we still enjoy breakfast foods a great deal, they had exclusively appeared in the guise of "breakfast for dinner" for as long as I can remember.

Not today. We opened the windows to cool breezes and the kind of peaceful quiet only a rainy day can bring (no mowing or blowing in this wet weather). I made nutty pancakes and sausage links and we enjoyed them with slow cups of coffee and watched the rain falling gently onto our grateful garden beds.Cool wet weather. I am not certain I have ever appreciated it so much as I have this year. The weather today soothes like a mother's cool kiss on a child's feverish forehead.I'm off to watch the hummingbirds quarrel over who gets what perch at their feeder. I hope you have a lovely day, wherever and however you are, and I hope you too are surprised by cool or warm or wet or dry, whatever you need the most.