Rain

This morning I awoke to a double concert of coyotes, an ancient predictor of rain. And indeed, it is raining! Slow rain falling straight down! I can almost hear the plants and trees opening to it. Hale and I were down on the stone deck untangling a particularly convoluted hose when it started. Neither of us minded getting wet, believe me.

Sydney asked me a question about our country property. We were amazed even to find it more than 20 years ago, It happened by complete luck, as it belonged to the realtor who was helping us look for a place. It was a small parcel adjacent to his father’s larger acreage, and cut off from it by a creek. Very few small places were available then; now they are more common, as developers have struck. What the downturn will do to the prices is open to question.

We do have a small pond (currently more mud than water); we do have said wet weather creek. We might have a horse or two if Hale hadn’t made me promise that we would never have any livestock that required feeding. Frankly, we have so much fun trying to discourage rabbits and armadillos that I can’t imagine what we would do with a horse. Someone suggested goats to eat the poison ivy, but we seem to have managed to eliminate that without them.

Yes, I write much more up here. I love my study, which is in the loft/attic we made years ago by raising the roof a little. I sit at my desk in the dormer and can look out across the yard into the woods that lead down to the creek (currently dry). I hear birds, and assorted wild or bovine cries, as well as any drilling rig within four miles, it seems, depending on which way the wind is blowing. Right now, the horse farm on Winedale Road seems to be in the process of creating a track of some sort. They have brought in great quantities of dirt, piled it up, and leveled it off some 6 feet above grade. I am hopeful that whatever it is won’t involve combustion engines or a loudspeaker system. We are particularly vulnerable here in this unincorporated area which has no noise ordinances.

This first photo is of the wet lichen on a branch of our most endangered live oak.

This second photo is of an egg I plucked from a container of free range eggs we bought on Saturday at the Farmers' Market on Eastside in Houston. Complete with small reddish feather. The eggs came from a farm located in Weimar, and at Winedale we are closer to it than to where we bought the eggs in Houston. Not very green of us, is it?