Even the mud puddles are different here in Coloradol

It rained the other night and I have to confess, it scared hell out of me.  Seems like when I was a tot back in Kansas, rain was more frequent and softer.  In Colorado, it seems to be either feast or famine, so to speak.  We lived about a mile from Bull Creek and it always had water in it, but when we got a good rain the little Bull Creek became a raging torrent and overflowed it's banks and came up the highway clear past the sand pit and almost to our corner.  I remember wading up the highway and the crawdads scooting away from me.  The scoot backwards, you know.

Strong Street was dirt.  Well, all the streets were dirt in that area.  Mostly the dirt was soft, but when it rained it would have puddles standing on it.  (Having a little problem here with proper English.  Do the puddles stand IN the road or ON the road?  Since they were on the road that sounds right, but since the actually were a part of the road they could be in the road.)  You choose.

Any way, after a rain the puddles were there and the sun shone brightly on them.  Now I am sure some of the water seeped into the earth, but it took a while and I remember seeing pollywog's swimming in the water, but it could have been mosquito larvae.  Who knows.  There is something so primal about wading in a mud puddle, that it defies description.  To feel the cool mud ooze between my toes was second only to walking on dried mud.

I do know that eventually the water was gone and the sun beating down on the puddle would cause the silty dirt to dry and crack.  The cracks would the curl on the edges and separate.  If I could be really patient, the sun would continue drying and then I was left with a big dried out patch of curled up mud.  The happiest memories are in the remembering, and I can still close my eyes and recall walking very slowly across the dried up mud in my bare feet.  The fragile mud curls made only a tiny crackle and I would walk slowly back and forth to be sure I mashed them all.  I have not had an experience like that since I left Nickerson.

Mud in Nickerson was also good for making mud pies.  The mud held together because parts of the road had clay.  My best friend, Barbara had a brother who nicknamed me "Mud Pie" and that name stuck until we went to high school.  Just happened to remember that.

The reason I am thinking of this is after our rains, there is a place in my driveway that water stands in for a short time.  I was looking at that yesterday, and the quality of the mud is not the same as Nickerson.  And for some reason, I do not see it making the curls like Nickerson mud made.  I suppose there is more gravel in my driveway.  Nickerson was sandy, hence the Sand Hill Plum Jelly that the Amish make and sell.

So as I start my day today, I will put on my shoes and socks and not even look at that puddle over there.  Some things can only continue in our memories and the days of sand and shovels and mud pies are over and are best left in the far recesses of my mind where I can use them as my safe place when life becomes too tedious and I need to escape.

The storm clouds gather...

One of my favorite things in life is clouds.  I have albums full of them and now I have my Picasa albums full of digital pictures.

 This is a fairly harmless shot of "maybe if we get together we can make rain" clouds.

This is a shot of drifty, buttermilk looking clouds at Garden of the Gods on one of the AIDS Walks.

.

This looks like it could really do something.

So anyway, you get the idea of the cloud fetish.  I want to go on record now as saying the clouds that are not clearly defined and hang over our heads like a foggy blanket are the ones we need to watch out for.  My state is being devastated by a silly thing called "rain".   For most of the summer we prayed for rain.  "Oh, Please God, just a little rain."  Our world was withering before our eyes.    Remember that?  Three feet of hail in Denver! 

I took Stockyards Road home on Thursday and the conflux of the Arkansas and Fountain creek was visible.  Arkansas was clear and calm.  Course it flows through the reservoir, but the Fountain was a ugly, angry brown mess.  Bear in mind that it had travelled 35 miles down here from up North and it had lost some of it's furor along the way, but it was still enough to terrify this faint little heart of mine.

It made me think of the people who are in the "eye of the weather".  How frightening that must be to have the rain just keep coming and watch your street fill up and see your property line shrinking.  It was bad enough when the fires were burning up on the mountains, but now there is nothing to stop the water when it races down hill.  And the faster it races, the more debris it picks up.  And our "powers that be" just nod and say, "Oh, a hundred year flood.  That is what it is."  Kind of sad that the loss of property and life is written off with such a simple statement.  Course there is always FEMA.

Here are my thoughts on this phenomenon;

We are a mighty nation.  We shake our fist and nations tremble.  We open our checkbook and nations grovel.  We smile and nations simper.  But when the storm clouds gather, no one is in charge.  Mother Nature has the last word.  (In my simple mind, Mother Nature and God are one and the same, but I shall call the entity Mother Nature in this missive.)  Mother Nature can not be controlled by mere mortals.  She causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.  And she keeps no time table.  She sends earthquakes to destroy temples and fires to consume the dead wood.  She washes her earth clean.  And we, being mere mortals that we are, fall to our knees and tremble.  We beg.  We grovel.  We try to explain it away, and  much like the fires in Yellowstone, we wait.  We wait and we know that soon the green shoot of grass will appear.  The tiny pine will peek from the forest floor.  The roots will go deep and cling to the bosom of Mother Earth.  In a few years we will have a forest again and God in his heaven will smile!

So for now, I will continue to collect my clouds knowing that some day I will be seeing the very bright sun!

You can not sprinkle showers of happiness on other people without getting a few drops on yourself!

 

 

 

This was Saturday when the smoke was at its worst at my house.

 

This was the sun about mid morning on Saturday.  I pointed the camera straight at it and clicked.  Normally all I can see when I do that is the glare, but this was filtered through a lot of smoke from the fires all around us.  The air was filled with a smoky smell and a haze hung over everything.

 

 

About 1:00 in the afternoon we caught a break and I got this picture of a helicopter on its way to one of the fires.  See how blue the sky was?  The smoke smell lifted for this period.

 

 

And then in the early evening it all came back.  Guess the cool morning and evening air held it closer to the ground.  My friend, Wanda, lives over at South Fork which is now under pre-evacuation warning and she said they can not even smell the smoke.  It apparently goes straight up and then down to the valley.  Lucky her.  Well, not really lucky her, because she is still in danger of losing her home.  I would not like to be in her shoes at all!

 

I picked Doug up for church yesterday morning and he said it had rained at his house the night before.  He said it was really nice.  I would not know since it did not rain at my house.  I have not even seen a rain cloud;  just smoke clouds.  I have been talking to the good Lord about this situation and I am sure he will remedy it soon.  Think how fast he could put out those fires, if he had  mind to.

 

But you know how this goes.  It is called nature and ever so often the forest fires thin the underbrush and the dead and diseased trees.  When we were down on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, they had a practice of going in and cutting down the dead trees and hauling them down to the road for people to use as fire wood.  Forest fires there are very rare, but of course the naturalists think that is interfering and a fern may loose it's happy home on the forest floor.  I do not know what the answer is.  I do know that there has been very little loss of life this fire season, which is indeed a blessing.

 

But I have been thinking, if I could get all my friends to pray for rain, maybe it would happen.  If you don't do the praying thing, try the karma and send good thoughts this way.  Just picture a nice soft rain falling all over Colorado.  Not a heavy downpour, because we have lots of areas that are now without vegetation.  That would cause flooding.  Just a little soft rain.

 

I would very much appreciate it!