primsong | Water water everywhere (Reply)

All the past week and more it's been raining here even more than usual, good hard, deep rain. The kind with lots of nicely squashy puddles to jump in, the kind that soaks the wood of the deck and makes it that deep red-gold in the filtered sunlight. The rain washed the blossoms of the rhododendron right off of the bush into a small heap of wet color on the ground beneath each bent and shining branch. Every now and then the sun would break through, and all the colors would blaze out against the blue-grey backdrop of the sky. Earthworms, seeking shelter from their flooded burrrows came in the little crack in the weatherstripping at the school and wormed their pale pink noodles down the hall to my library where I tossed them back out. The unlucky ones that did it while I was gone were tossed as little worm-mummies instead.

Then the rain storm passed, and the sun came out. The saturated ground began to dry, all bubbling and squeaking as the water slipped out and percolated away. The ground dried, yes... but our driveway did not!

Seems we have a major water leak - who knows how long it's been going? How could we tell in all that water? Down into the deep-brown mud went the shovel, through my vincas-that-are-done-blooming, down to the poplar roots that had cracked the pipe. Sigh. What a huge water bill we will have, such an irony after all that free water from the sky.