I was mentioning to someone that we had exceeded our yearly average rainfall, which was a bright little piece of news amidst floods, landslides, and tsunami.
“The problem is,” she said, “we don’t have average rainfall. It’s either drought or deluge.”
How true that is.
This morning my husband looked out the window and said, “The sky is a funny color. How odd.”
The sky was blue. The sun was out. I went for a walk! Neighbors were out looking like survivors of a, well, deluge. It was hard to believe that two days earlier, I had seen the rain gutters on Soquel Drive spouting up ten feet because of the force of water coming down the hills. One day earlier, my husband had cleaned out a stopped gutter at our house and the resulting deluge blew the hose off the end of the downspout and dug a hole in the dirt six inches deep.
After my walk, I happily attacked a few gardening tasks, wallowing in the mud with glee. I went at a patch of grass that had invaded my beautiful patch of bacopa, grass which I attempt to remove every year and always fail. Why do I fail? Because it’s drought or deluge here. If I want plants, I get weeds. The only way to not get weeds is to make it inhospitable to plants altogether. The fussier gardeners amongst us put in inches of gravel where they don’t want plants. The totally laissez-faire amongst us let it all go where it will. Personally, I’m a controlled chaos sort of person. I like my garden to look wild, but only in the way I want it to.
This succeeds, perhaps, a little bit better than my similar approach to parenting.
I finished the grass-removing task and apologized to all the bacopa I had to rip up in the process. Of course, the bacopa will take root again. But the grass’s roots are still in there, and next year, it will return and I’ll try again.
The weather guys say we’re looking at a week without rain. I think we can all live with that. People I know are evacuated from their flooded towns, stuck behind a landslide in their hillside neighborhood, and ready to trade their kids in for tropical fish.
Enough already. The crabapples are blooming; it’s time for spring.
