OmegaMom

Okay, so as Singing Bird says, we southwesterners are rather monotonous at this time of year, yapping on and on about the weather, waiting for the rain, yearning for the monsoon season, wondering when it will start, and how long it will run, and how much rain we’ll get.

People in Texas right now must be bug-eyed at the thought of an entire region of the country wanting rain.  I’m sorry, folks.  I know you’ve been drowned to within an inch of your life, that you’re sick and tired of water.

But…being a southwestern gal, I have to dance and sing and spin about with my head arched back, just like a little kid.

It starts with tiny, wispy puffs of cloud.  As you watch, the puffs grow.  They expand.  They get fat.  They tumble over each other.  Go away for half an hour, and when you return, the little white wisps have turned into huge, towering thunderheads with leaden grey bottoms.

Usually, we have a week or two of those leaden grey bottoms producing only skeins of rain, thin veils that never reach the ground.

And then…then the miracle occurs.

Water!  Falling from the sky!

Being a born and bred Chicagah girl, there are times when my gut response to the first storms of monsoon season is just…totally incomprehensible.  After all, Chicago has one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world.  You dig a hole in the ground, and if you’re too close to the lake, you only have to dig about five feet before water starts showing up.  And, of course, it rains–wonderful, fierce midwestern storms, where you can feel the cold front passing through as the deciduous trees bend down before the wind.  The idea of just getting incoherently excited by water!  Falling from the sky! is bewildering to the Chicagah girl in me.

But there it is.

And there it was, today.  Rain.  Blessing of moisture, falling down on upturned faces in the office parking lot.  Sharp scent of hot rock and sun-warmed pines being touched by H2O.  Electrical excitement of watching the lightning sizzle between cloud and ground, and between cloud A and cloud B.

Alas, it wasn’t really much rain.  I think we managed a total of about .2 inches.  Enough to cause the aforementioned excitement, but not enough to really do diddley in the tinder-dry forest.

Last year, in June, there was a large fire in Way Cool Creek Canyon, to the west of Mills Park, the less hippy-dippy forest enclave to the south of us.  Fifteen miles away as the crow flies, but separated from us by the canyon, and by a highway.

Today’s storms brought our usual dozen or so fires started by lightning, the majority of them extinguished by hyper-vigilant firemen and women who are strung to the edge by the constant worry–”Is this the killer fire of the year?”  One of those fires, however, took hold.  Between, oh, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., it had grown to (at least) 350 acres.  This fire is to the east of Mills Park, on our side of the highway.  It certainly didn’t look to be a mere 350 acres to me as I drove down the highway to deposit the dotter with OmegaGranny.  And driving back through the darkness, at one or two exits on the highway, it looked like the fire was right there, the red glow silhouetting ponderosas, highlighted by yellower spots here and there, and drifts of smoke.

So, a message to the karma gods:  I don’t really want the house to burn down.  I was just saying it.  ‘Kay?