THE RAIN STICKS, HOPE COMES

I am not going to mention the rain again, you me and everyone is bored with the subject - hang on - I've just mentioned it - d***!
I am wondering if its is all the fault of my Chilean rain stick.

R has been out with the power washer - power washing the paving. I have started the weeding and clearing up and shifted a barrow load of the old manure - my back is not what it was - partly as I was trying to push the barrow with a half flat tyre - and the old muck is wet and heavy. 
The wagon has been to collect the mowers for servicing.

Today, Wednesday, has been a good day - rain due but not yet. The sun shone this afternoon and we are all confused as to what is this strange light in the sky.

 Now to some house planty bits with pics of the poor ailing things. Poinsettia still surviving me on the left and a Peruvian lily on the right that has needed potting on months ago. 
Then on the right is the lemon scented geranium that comes in for the winter. I hacked this back last spring but it is doing okay.
However the streptocarpus on the left, also needing repotting, got overwatered as we were both topping it up and a lot of the leaves went yucky so I cut them off. It is in recovery mode.

 This is the window in the utility where I stick odd stuff, blue salvia on the left, then dead parsley, a small Hydrangea Annabelle alive and sprouting and two amaryllis almost at the end of their build up for next years flowering.

R has developed the habit of announcing that the moorhen is back on the pond by saying she can see the mallard. There are differences - one could eat a mallard but a moorhen would be very scraggy.

So what does one do when it is raining outside - eat. sleep, tv, write blogs, muck about and read. It is such a shame Harry Bosch is now a pensioner. I have just finished an amazing book - Joshua's Story by James Titcombe - traumatic reading of how the death of his son began a road through the minefield of NHS and political bureaucracy to change the way the NHS works.

Now I am reading The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks about a disappearing way of life in The Lake District. I grew up on a sheep farm though was never going to be a shepherd but recognise much of what he describes.
At the moment we have a movement for the wilding of the fells, the removal of the sheep - and of a way of life that certainly dates back to the Vikings and maybe many thousands of years further. In the end it may be achieved because hill farming cannot pay.

The outcome may be that wilding comes but with it the landscape loved by visitors will change for ever as fields disappear to be replaced by more upland woods. And these woods will reach up onto the mountains obscuring the views.

The tree fellows (fellers?)(both) are cutting down a neighbours huge evergreen and we will have a much better sight of the bay.



And then suddenly, after a dark wet morning, the sun comes blasting from behind a cloud. I walk up the garden, treading carefully on the gravel paths, and see new growth - snowdrops pushing through the leaf litter, buds braking on the flowering currant and there is light everywhere. The trees are full of finches and tits; robins, dunnocks and blackbirds scrabble around searching for food.
Of course it does not last, soon it darkens over and rain returns but now I can see into the future and how it might be.

The paving needs repointing so got a man coming to quote Tuesday - cannot do it until weather better though.

It is raining again.