Three years' worth of rain, missing in action, began filtering into Tioga County in March and by now are nearly all accounted for. The roadsides are lushly covered as we have not seen them in our 6 years here, with plants arguing with us whether they are fern or flower. Names they have, but names we do not know. The loveliest is the one that you would sewar is a carpet of good old friend purple clover... until you stop to cut a bunch and find instead a viny ferny ground cover so robust that it grows up just for space, making the flowers appear tall when in fact they are merely climbing each other amid the delicate roseleaf-like greenery upon which they travel.

The black-eyed Susans here have just begun to call to me again, having just this week popped up among the rest of the riot, and they seem surprised at all the company. It has been just daisies and Queen Anne's lace competing, for many years. Now they are struggling to be tall enough to anchor the whole display-- which they can, having the strongest color. And jostle they do, and are jostled as well, turning their dark flashing eyes to the roadway and to the sun while it briefly hovers over the rock cut made by the roadlayers.

(A pile of all this bounty lies a-drying in my office near the air conditioner vent on the floor. It has been so humd for so long that nothing will dry if hung from mere attic rafters. This bunch awaits shipment to a friend's dry and hot home, and although it was odorless when cut, it now smells just like fresh mown hay and when the box is opened.... if my friends are smart they will moo.)

The county's gravel hill roads are so thickly covered this year that the roadside spring has all but vanished under the encroaching canopy bursting from under trees that, last year, were the only sparse impediment to the trail extending up and past a large and comfy-looking fallen log. And deadfalls are in record numbers this year also, the thin soil cover being so wet that roots and all, the trees surrender their verticality to the west winds of cloudbursts.

County workers circulate among the roads looking for roadside tallgrass to mow, and are finding only this lovely purple carpet, just low enough to leave. They strip a token section extending a few feet either side of intersecting roads, and move on. There will be trees to pick up, this year, instead, and the paychecks will still come with no need to strip the beauty all natives' eyes here must have been aching to see. We, ourselves only recent transplants with roots so shallow, can only give thanks for the wisdom to wait out the dry times and to celebrate the wet.

Peter... thank you again.

~S~