Clean as a Baby After a Bath

While we were away this year's monsoon season started for real. It rained -- a lot -- while we were gone and then kept raining for days when we got back. Intermittent showers alternated with hard rain followed by mist and drizzle and then more rain. It never cleared.

But the sun came out this morning and skies are blue. My rain gauge has 4 inches in it from all the days of rain, almost half our annual precipitation.

Normally summer monsoon mornings are bright and then huge cloud formations build in the afternoons and dump buckets of brief driving rain on us before moving on. This year has been strange with a long stretch of constant steady rain for so many days in a row.

It's welcome. The last precipitation of any kind was March 23, so we'd gone 3 full months without a drop. My gardens, even with my new irrigation system, struggled. The landscape looked so stressed. Fires over the mountains were catastrophic. Dust was everywhere.

Now it looks better and the fires have abated. In my garden long dead tree stumps have sent up knee-high sprouts, and a couple plants I thought I lost long ago suddenly appeared. Mushrooms have sprouted in the mulch. My potted plants are soggy.

But mostly everything just looks fresh and clean. As clean as a baby after a bath.

Yes, really.