Rain Rain Go Away

In my last post, I proudly uploaded a photo of the garden that I had planted on Tuesday, just in time, I innocently thought, for the rain forecast for Wednesday.  That rain indeed arrived on schedule on Wednesday evening, gently at first, then a bit harder.  And then it rained all day on Thursday.  And on Friday.  In addition to reducing the garden to sprawling, bedraggled, flooded plants begging for sunshine, this rain has made running a challenge.  Martha ran (and I walked) on Wednesday before most of this precipitation had begun.  Since then, we have been looking for those little windows of opportunity between wave after wave of rain.

Once again, I have relied on the app on my iPhone called MyRadar, which shows doppler radar for the area, inching across the screen every hour.  From time to time, an opening in the green and yellow (and, even worse, orange and red area) will appear.  Such an opening appeared on Friday morning and we were both able to walk and run - four miles for Martha, two for me - in light drizzle before it began once again in earnest.

Last night, we had invited Martha's aunt Anne to our house along with two of her friends from Savannah in celebration of her 89th birthday.  I watched the radar all afternoon, wondering if we would be able to dine outside, which Anne dearly loves.  She maneuvers well on two crutches but we were also worried about the slick conditions on our stone walk to the back door.  So I scrubbed it with clorox and we set the indoor dining room table.  Miraculously, the rain disappeared an hour or so before she was scheduled to arrive.  We were able to eat outside at the table on our deck almost all the way through the well-received picnic we had prepared, when a sudden warning scattering of rain on the metal roof encouraged us to move inside, just in time.

While we visited in the living room, the rain would seem to let up, then return with a vengeance.  At one point I think it poured harder than we had ever experienced, thundering so loudly on the roof that we could not hear ourselves talk.  It reminded me of that Tom Waits song Time:

And the rain sounds like a round of applause.
And Napoleon is weeping in a carnival saloon
His invisible fiancee's in the mirror.
And the band is going home, 
It's raining hammers, it's raining nails.

On my iPhone, the radar showed a bright orange flower that kept blooming, over and over again, right where we are located (the blue dot in the photo), before finally sliding off to the north.  During this brief abatement, Anne was able to get to the car with her friends and make it safely home.  And then it seemed to let up for several hours before returning to wake us in the night from time to time.

The heavy rain is especially unfortunate because this is the weekend for the Highlands Motoring Festival, and although there was a small turnout on Pine Street, many of the owners did not even display their fine cars.  I drove to Town to see what was going on, and there were a few tents set up under which owners huddled in the driving rain, looking as bedraggled as my newly-planted yellow squash plants.