Into every life, a little rain must fall.

Gentle Readers: We left our heroines in the wee hours of Friday morning, driving down the uncharacteristically serene highway, to home and sleep. But off in the southwest, clouds were on the move. By the time we reached Hugo lightning was flashing regularly, and a steady rain met us at the Saint Paul city limits, the uninvited End of the 2023 Drought, come to quench the earth and revive all growing things!

Hurray for the rain, someone’s prayers are being answered! Just not mine.

The rain was on-and-off-and-mostly-on for the next 30 hours or so. I received a text from the house mover guy, celebrating our luck at getting the house delivered just in time. By Sunday morning, the rain gauge in my front yard was leaning askew, obviously drunk and apathetic. I drove up to view Lake Inferior:

I spent a couple hours picking rocks from the piles surrounding the hole — Mike the excavator said he doesn’t want to dump them against the foundation when he backfills, and he kindly pushed some really big boulders aside for me. I might’ve been a geologist in a previous life, or possibly a stone mason; my mind is easily blown when it comes to million-year-old rocks that are shoved here from far away by a river of ice a mile thick.

I ended up the afternoon with several rockpiles, a little of everything: large and small, all colors, egg-shaped and rough angled. The best pocket-able ones I brought home with me, including what I think is a nice big agate (anyone out there got a lapidary saw?).

And so now we wait for this last wave of thundercrap to pass over the river valley. By the end of the weekend, the golden beams of autumn should bring drier air, and there’ll be more Big Fun before …

(don’t say it!)

Don’t

say

‘snow’