Rainy Day Confession

I'm fancy myself a gardener, or at least a severe garden putterer. I can spend hours in the yard, pulling weeds, digging shredded leaves into the sandy soil, or just wandering about my plants, which I confess I talk to, and possibly treat better than family members. I check in on them daily, pamper them and worry about them. I know, it's pathetic. Just buy me a cat and call me Old Lady.

So I've done a fair amount of planting around the cabin, and after two weeks of nothing but 100-degree temps here, I was starting to get a bit concerned about our ability to keep everything alive.  We usually get a fair amount of rain, but the TV weatherman kept telling me Chattanooga was down 7 inches for the year. I couldn't believe it, because when it does rain up here on Flat Top, it's almost always a gully-washer. But then, after two weeks of Africa-hot heat (without even a fan to cool us), I started to think a bit too much about getting enough water for my garden. (Maybe blame it on not having a kitchen remodel to fret about?)

So I told Mason: Let's get a rain gauge so I can keep track of how much is falling up here. Oh man, just call us Old People.

Mason dutifully put it on The List. (We keep a serious list up here; we have to, because we only go to town once or twice a week, and lord knows our aging brains couldn't remember whether it was wasp spray we needed or cooking spray.)

Now, with the kitchen remodel finished, The List hasn't had much on it. Maybe that's why Mason seemed overly determined to fulfill the order. First we hit up the Tractor Supply store in Soddy-Daisy, but all there was to pick from was either a really boring plastic tube or a hideously kitschy cow-on-a-tractor gauge. It's on clearance, Mason said excitedly, as he picked up the mini-tractor. ("It's imported!" he mentioned, trying to close the deal and not have to stop at 14 more stores looking for a damn rain gauge. Me? "China does not count as 'imported.' ") I wanted something a bit more "cute" than a piece of plaster, but a cow on a tractor? Um, no way. So off to Home Depot. Nothing but the boring variety. Stockdale's. Nope.

So guess what now graces our upstairs deck railing? Yup. So, so sad. And sure enough, as soon as we brought home the hideous lawn kitsch, the heat broke and the skies fell open. Yesterday it rained nearly 3 inches, and today? Check out that photo (that's our real tractor in the background)! Four inches of rain by about 6 p.m., and it hasn't stopped falling since then. See what I mean? It's nothing but buckets up here.

Oh man, I just hope that smiling cow doesn't show up in a nightmare tonight.