This Month's Story
(Originally published in 2003)
I heard the sliding glass door near me open and then close. Stella had come out on the porch. She looked out at the lawn and then came and sat down beside Jennie, Holly and me, joining us in our morning struggle to start the day.
“Why are you running the sprinkler?”
I looked out to where the array of five sprinkler jets moved in separate independent dances, spewing broad graceful sweeps of water across the front lawn and garden. The early morning light caught the droplets flung out in the moving sweeps and the effect was as if we had a broad series of diamond spewing fountains stretched across our front lawn.
“It ‘s been a little dry.”
“Oh.” It was a weak sort of I see ‘oh.’ Meaning she didn’t really see, but she didn’t say anything more and we sat quietly, watching the dance of the bright plumes of water in the morning light.
There was a good reason, I suppose, for her question. Although we had not had any rain to speak of the last two days, when it had rained, it had been an inch and a half and the day before it two inches. Adding to that was the fact that we were having one of the rainiest springs and summers that we could remember.
Our grass was a rich, lush green and had to be mowed each week without fail. In fact, its growth rate was such that it really should be mowed every five rather than seven days. The flowers we had in the garden and in pots were blooming better than in any previous years. It was indeed a great year for gardens.
It hasn’t been always so. We have had several years when it didn’t rain very much and one or two in which it seem to stop raining completely after the first of August. We didn’t have a sprinkler then and watering the lawn became an all day affair, moving long coils of cumbersome hoses to new watering positions every hour, hour after hour, setting the kitchen timer and then when it went off going through the whole procedure again.
Stella started in on me to put in a sprinkler, but I became adamant in saying no. Then one day last year, as I was moving the hose for the fifth time that day, I realized that the only reason I was saying no was because Stella was saying yes. I dropped the hose and made the call.
The men came with white pipes and shovels and set to work. In three days, they had it all installed. They gave me a demonstration and after I approved the result, they set the timer to go off in three days.
“There’s a rain gage on the timer to sense if it’s been raining,” one of the men explained. “If it has it’ll hold off sprinkling for another three days.”
Three days later, it started to rain. A good hard rain. The next two days, more rain. The next week, still more rain. It rained so much that summer that I never really had to use the sprinkler. Worse, during one rainstorm, lighting hit the house and the sprinkler’s small electronic rain gage on the eave of the roof disappeared in a spectacular show of pyrotechnics.
Now this year we are again having a record amount of rain and the sprinkler is lying quietly in the ground, sleeping more than sprinkling.
Yesterday, as I sat on the porch I looked over at Herb’s house. He lives in a white brick house across the side street that separated us. It was raining on his side of the street but not on ours. Bemused, I walked to the east end of the porch and watched, expecting the rain to quickly move on or stop. It didn’t. It stayed and rained for about three or four minutes; all the time on Herb’s side of the street, not on mine.
What was extraordinarily nice was that the rain was just a mild summer shower. It was early in the day and the sun was at the perfect angle from the east, behind the rain. Shining as it did through the falling rain, the sun’s rays illuminated the rain drops, turning them into millions of bright beads of light. It was a wondrous thing to see; all of these falling drops, because of the differing angles of each in relation to the sun and me, changing with varying scales of brightness and radiant color.
Then it was over and the rain moved on, leaving only the street steaming in the remaining dampness and in my minds eye, the crisp memory of what I had seen.
As I sat on the porch this morning, I thought about the previous day’s shower and the way sun light had illuminated it. As I sat remembering, I saw that our lawn was being bathed in the rays of an early morning sun. I got up carefully, so as not to disturb Jennie or Holly, and opening the control box, switched the sprinkler to “ON.”
Returning to my chair, I made myself comfortably and waited. The several sprinkler jets in the lawn, sputtered, spewed, then finally began jetting forth broad, moving arcs of water. As these arcs moved out in the morning air, they feathered and dropped as gentle showers of rain, thousands of droplets of water. These were flung across the lawn, each and all brightly reflecting the sun …
… and me,
and shortly after the sliding glass door opened and closed,
Stella’s pleased wonder.
