It’s been raining for days, a beautiful finish to a long dry spell in the Carolina’s. Durham was down to 60 days of water, and so was considering restricting lawn watering. The homeowners associations in town were warning members to keep their yards up. Even three days of on-to-two inches a day won’t make up for a long drought. Today, at last, it stopped soaking into the parched ground and began running off.
On the other side, all the fall flowers that were not blooming because of the drought rushed to get a full season’s reproduction in. I woke up with puffy eyes and a swollen throat—I certainly didn’t feel like writing.
Flowers weren’t the only thing that was behind. Eight months of drought meant the gutters had not been rinsed out once. So today they were clogged up. The water sucking into the ground left the well murky.
But I don’t care. It’s wet again. The sound of water on the roof was odd, at first, something unremembered. But it came back. And with it came sound sleep. Even the dogs were quieter. The deer who have been coming out of the woods searching for watered shrubs stayed at home. That nagging worry about whether the well would make is relieved. I slept well.
And I plan to do it again.