Musings of a Technonerd

Got up this morning at my usual time, around 5:45. Took my shower, shaved, got my lunch ready to go, had a little breakfast, dressed, all the usual stuff.

Lately, there's been a new addition to my morning routine. Having always been fascinated with weather, I've enlisted in a program in my county to record and report rainfall and snowfall amounts. In addition to writing down the observations on a chart and mailing that in, I also enter in the numbers on a website.

So there I was, out on my back deck at about 6:30 in the morning, looking at the rain gauge, when I took a minute to notice the surroundings.

Now, we'd been having a bit of a drought in Minnesota lately. We received hardly any rain whatsoever during the months of June and July. I'd all but given my yard up for a goner, and had also taken to giving my trees much needed drinks of water so they wouldn't go into stress. I don't even want to talk about how much water I poured onto my tomatoes! But all that changed in August. Since the 5th of August, we've received 9.83 inches of rain in my back yard.

This has done much to bring everything back to life. My yard is now lush and green again, and I haven't so much as touched my hoses for anything.

The temp was 52 degrees, and the sky was clear. The air was crisp, and filled with the aromas of early fall. I could smell pines, mature tomato plants, and other signs of late fall/early spring. The birds were noisy too. They're busy, along with the squirrels, at their job of fattening themselves up for the upcoming winter. So they were flitting around this morning, picking up various worms and bugs to eat. It was quiet, and life was good. After a couple of minutes, I pulled up a chair, and simply enjoyed what I was experiencing. The rush to get to work could go to hell as far as I was concerned.

My grandfather, an Ojibwe Indian who'd lived along with nature all of his life, had an uncanny knack for being able to judge the type of winter we had coming. There was no magic sign, such as a wooly caterpillar, or anything like that. It was everything. All of it. And he'd been around long enough to be able to interpret all the signs and put it all together. I used to go visit him for Thanksgiving and would go to his woodshed to see how much wood he'd stocked up. (The grandparents lived on a tree farm south of Ely, Mn.) If he'd stocked up quite a bit, invariably, we'd have a stout winter. I asked him once how he did it. "It's no any one thing," he told me. "It's a combination of a whole bunch of things. You just have to pay attention to what's going on around you, and figure it out." Of course, being a know-it-all kid, that went in one ear and out the other. He passed away in 1983, and I've missed him dearly ever since. I sure wish I'd paid more attention to what he was trying to tell me.

So I sat there this morning, doing something most city people rarely do anymore, and just watched and enjoyed the wonderful sights and sounds of nature for a while. It was wonderful and very refreshing.

"Are we going to work or not!" Oops. I was yanked back into "civilization" quickly and efficiently by my wonderful (but punctual) wife. It was indeed time to get the hell out the front door. But I gotta tell you.

That was the best ten minutes I'd spent in some time.

"How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!" ~Emily Dickinson