Rain

(post by Jason) Spring around here is not normally a dry time of year. Most of the time, errant cold fronts and Gulf of Mexico low pressure systems interact and interplay frequently enough over our area that we get lots and lots of rain. Sometimes if a low pressure system gets stuck over the area for long enough we get way too much rain and after a point ceases to do any good.

Too much rain hasn’t been a problem this year. We’ve mostly been stuck on warm and dry since early March and our pastures and hay ground were worryingly dry and beginning to burn up. This is a foreboding sign at the beginning of the hot season because once summer comes cold fronts effectively cease to arrive with moisture this far south. We haven’t had a good rain in more than a month. So when the weather forecasters predicted a 40 % chance of rain this weekend we really didn’t pay it much mind. Many of my neighbours kept right on cutting hay.

I was all set to say I told you so yesterday afternoon. They predicted rain through the day yesterday and it never came. I mowed pastures all day and the few spits of rain we got weren’t even enough to wet the hood of the tractor much less make me duck for cover. But about suppertime last night while I was loading a truck with junk for the dump the sky got dark and something changed. It began to rain, lightly at first and then a bit harder but steady in a way that told me it meant to stay. It rained like that all night and it’s been raining all day today. It’s still raining as I write this and we’ve added nearly three inches to the rain gauge outside and every drop of it went in the dry ground where it’ll do some good. Farmers up where I come from would call this a million dollar rain. I don’t know about that but I do know it was very, very welcome here in Middle Tennessee.

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Too bad I wasn’t at a better angle for this picture; Faune, Lotus, Winston, Romeo and Titan enjoying a run through the pasture