Monsoon Season

I didn't think Denver had a monsoon season, but we seem to be in it now. The ninth straight day of torrential afternoon and evening downpours. I can't get enough rain. I grew up in New Mexico, where the weather never matched the brooding novel I was reading. When I first read Cormac McCarthy, I got a little pang of regret. If only I had read him in high school! I might have seen something romantic and interesting in the high country desert. All that love of New Mexico came later, long after I didn't live there any more.

If there isn't lightning, R and I have an agreement that we will run out into the storm and lie in the grass. It's irritating, because sometimes I am busy and not inclined to get wet. But rainstorms are few and far between, so I always indulge her. Most often the storm ends before we get tired of the wet grass. If it doesn't, we run inside to dry off and read books in bed until the storm is over. Usually we do that once every three or four months. We have both been enjoying the ridiculousness of doing our ritual every single day for over a week. We have gotten through a lot of chapters of Prince Caspian.

Yesterday there was a storm that looked to me like hurricane footage from tv. Sheets and walls of water, trees bent sideways, a river pouring down the street.

Once it had been over for awhile and I was sure the lightning was gone, I went outside to take pictures. The water had been much higher than this. It flooded the lawn and stopped just short of the basement windows. I tried to take pictures from inside the house, but you couldn't see through the sheets of rain.

For the first time I can remember, this storm was something other than, hurray! rain! It briefly turned into hail at one point, and we watched out the windows as water flowed up over the curb and cascaded onto the lawn. The thunder was tooth-grinding, earth-shaking, Charlie dove under our bed and wouldn't come out. That's when you start to think, what happens if this doesn't stop. The streets are flooded out. How is D going to get home? What's it like downtown?

And then the sun comes out, and the birds are singing.

D got home fine, Charlie got his walk and the water was almost gone by then.

We are back to appreciating how much the flowers, and the lawn, love this weather.

R and her best friend E are building a dam of rocks, against the next deluge. R is in a phase of wearing her Easter dress every day. Que sera.

I'm not sure what they mean for the dam to do. If it worked, it would stop the flow of water and back it up so that it flooded E's house across the street.

E told me that this is "the lock where I keep my friendship with R." I love that, because it's not a locket, it's really just a padlock. I asked her, does it have anything inside it? And she looked at me like I was crazy.