Morning After

Yesterday morning Debi and I, along with Lea and Mo’i (our two beautiful field spaniels), took our usual walk a mile or so up the hill south of our home. It was special yesterday because this was the “morning after” the first big rain of the season.

Visually, everything was clean and bright and green. Olfactorally (??), the fresh and spicy desert smells were back — and we know from experience that they’ll keep getting better and better from now until early summer.

There were some more changes as well, some a little subtle (such as the more saturated colors of the damp rocks). My favorite: the many expanses of solid rock on the hillsides covered with a thin film of water, flashing and glinting in the morning light. These wet rocks are very common in this area. They’re caused by a seep or a spring that flows onto a sloped area of smooth rock — and the granite that our hills has many such rocks. Some of them are quite large (as much as a few acres), and when one of them has a sheet of water on it, the visual effect can be spectacular. Typically these rocks are curved and have small imperfections in them, which means that the reflective sheet of water is not flat — it’s more like a jumbled pile of broken mirror pieces in its visual effects. It sparkles, in other words. And the effects change as you move, as the wind blows, and as the sun moves through the sky…