Happiness Is This, Is This...

It rained. Lovely, long, slow rain. Sort of between a heavy drizzle and a light rain, but it lasted about 40 minutes.

I sat on the front porch and just listened to it fall. What a nice front porch we have. It's got the two adirondack chairs Matt gave me for my birthday and Valentines and the fan we installed (which was good, because it wasn't a very cooling rain, but it was a very muggy one), and the landscape lights Mom & Dad gave us were lighting up the undersides of the crape myrtle leaves, and I turned off the porch light and sat in the dark, and it way very, very nice, very quiet, rather private, very nice.

Many people don't have a front porch, and many more have a sort of skinny fake front porch that's too narrow for actual use and is really just for show. This is a shame. A front porch, with a fan, and two adirondack chairs, and a big pecan out front, and a row of fat potted plants for privacy is a wonderful thing.

It pains me to acknowledge anything nice about this drought, but I have to admit three good things: (1) Fewer mosquitos (2) scarcely any tent caterpillars, meaning the pecans look unusually green and wholesome, and (3) on those rare occasions that it does rain, one really pays attention. People who live in Portland probably don't even look up from their newspapers, or Kindles, or whatever, when it starts raining again. But us, we cherish every grey cloud and worship every raindrop.