Rain!

According to my weather instruments (click on the picture at right for a full-sized view), we’ve received just over an inch of rain in the past 24 hours — and close to an inch and a half in the past 48 hours. To those of you in the wetter parts of the (that would be just about anywhere else!), that may not sound like much. But for the desert rats like us, this is manna from heaven…

Within an hour of the rain starting, the formerly blackened moss on the rocks had turned bright green. Even though I’ve witnessed this dozens of times, it still amazes me how the first real shower of the rainy season transforms the chaparral country. The accumulated dust of months, caked and burned into the leaves and onto the bright red trunks of the manzanitas, is all washed away. The gusty winds that accompanied the rains blew most of the dead leaves off. And somehow many of the desert plants store away their chlorophyll during the dry season, and take it back out again after a good rain — producing exhuberant greens where before there was black or gray. The visual transformation is magical enough, but there’s more — with the rains, the wonderful and intense smells of the desert will be back in our mornings. Within a few days, it’s easy to predict, we’ll start smelling it again on our morning walks…

But best of all, of course: this inch of rain means the chaparral around us has at least a few more months of safety from fire.