rain and what follows

You need rain to remind you how good sunshine can be. (I know, you need it for other reasons too, but I’m taking the position of a person living on a mostly unproductive farm, so it’s all about how the weather affects us and our handful of growing things.) It’s our second day of rain. I write the manuscript during rainy days, but it’s a forced write. I sigh and sit down because going outside when it’s raining is pointless.

So I write. And I make progress and I’m thinking that these are the last writing days for me this year and maybe that’s a good thing because maybe I am just a summer season writer. And maybe that’s deliberate, so that I never have to release anything into the public domain, or at least not until I’m good and dead and I’ll avoid the whole people knocking on your door thing, telling you – it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like what you wrote at all.

When you blog, you make many friends and you lose a few, but when you write and release a whole book of material all at once, I should think that you make very few friends and create a pool of disappointment so deep that perhaps you never quite recover.

So maybe I think about that when I choose, on sunny days, to step outside and work in the garden rather than working on my book.

But, today there was no garden work. Yes, there was breakfast on the porch...

...and a quick flower viewing – before the rain...

...and during a pause...

...and that was it.

Having stocked the fridge with so much food last week, I felt it wrong to suggest a trip to the grocer’s again, but in fact we’ve eaten the last leftover sandwich, the milk supply is low and the fruit – well, our hold looks like something we would have at the tail end of  winter season. Tomorrow. I'll restock tomorrow.

We do make it to Paul’s, despite the rain...

...and we go to the farmers’ market, despite the rain...

...and we even pop in to see my daughter, despite the rain...

Tomorrow we’ll play tennis and I’ll prune and pick beetles off of roses and zap mosquitoes with the zapper and chase hornets out of the mailbox. Unless it rains.