STORIES FROM THE GARDEN – EARLY AUTUMN GIFTS | intempestivoviandante's Blog

(l’articolo in italiano qui)

In the last few days, I’ve been practicing rain dance (please don’t hate me!). Unfortunately, I can’t dance, and I might have overdone it a little, my moves might have been not exactly right, or maybe, the downpour gods resented the fact that I used very mainstream songs in my exercise dance mix, so to speak.

However. I’ve been thinking, we actually change a lot, over the years and the seasons. The town girl I was would have fully agreed with the idea that rain is “bad weather”; after three days, she would have complained about “how awful it is, will it ever, ever stop?!”; and she would have continued, as in Bob Seger’s Someday, to keep on reachin’ for the sun.

For the middle-aged country lady I’ve become, though, well, that’s another matter altogether: that lady loves rain (almost) like sunny days, and every down and then, she cries out for her fair share of dark, rainy clouds. Also because that lady lives (for a large part of the year), in a place where summers are cool but definitely sunny, especially in recent years. And, above all, she has a vegetable garden and a flower garden.

As for most things, the good comes with some bad here.

BAD: the rain brings animals and bugs, not all of which are beneficial, when it comes to plants. Some of them are actually… real pests. And weeds, oh, weeds just, well, pouring in. And mud, too, especially if the soil is clayey, like ours, which means it forms concrete-like, drenched, sticky clumps (especially if walked over), which, in summer, will become extremely dry and shrink into cracked and – would you believe it – concrete-like clumps.

GOOD: apart, of course, from quenching the thirst of plants, which are almost always better even after a brief rain shower than after being watered, whatever the way and the amount: weeds come out more easily (although you will always have to be careful not to “lump it up” by goofily treading on it); the sun seems brighter and warmer afterwards, the sky clearer, the air more transparent, and everything seems to be given new life, to get stronger, blossom and bloom, like this: