Rain!

Last night, just before we went to bed, we had a light shower. I woke up several times during the night to the delightful sound of raindrops hitting all the dry leaves and grasses — a bit like rain on a distant, muted tin roof. And this morning, I ran in to look at the weather system first thing — and miracle of miracles, we got over a half inch!

You non-desert folks might scoff at this. I can just hear some of my friends now, mocking our half inch as “just barely damp”. But for us, this is an extremely welcome wetting of the tinder we’re surrounded with; it means a significant reduction in the fire danger.

And we like that!

Update:

I took a run into town to do some errands, and once again had the experience of seeing the sudden greening that comes to the desert very quickly after a rain. As always, the most dramatic greening is with our mosses — they’ve been black all summer, tricking our expectations into thinking that flat black is their normal state. But within minutes after a rain, they start turning green — and by this morning they are all bright emerald green, very different than yesterday. Slightly subtler is the greening of the other plants — a combination of happy chlorophyll and the dust getting washed off. I’m not sure which effect is predominant. Another change, not so subtle, is that everything got darker when it got wet — rocks, tree trunks and branches, even the pavement — so the greens are more dramatically contrasted…