The rain must never fall til after sundown.
By 9:00 pm the moonlight must appear. . .

Okay, so the moon wasn’t out Friday night, but it was pelting down rain. Our neighbor Jan, the one who keeps the entire neighborhood running smoothly, reported that we got an inch and a half of rain that night! Not a bad way to start the season. Of course, we started off with a bang last season as well, and then the rain just petered out. We ended up getting a little more than half our annual rainfall last year.

I don’t much like droughts.

We slept with the door slightly ajar, so as to let the sound in. Keno is sleeping out in the sunroom these days, which is more like a greenhouse than anything else, with glass above and along both sides of his bed. He loves it out there, mostly because when it rains, the sound is thunderous!

I love the sound of rain on the roof. Although the squirrels, or blue jays (haven’t gotten up out of bed to see who’s doing this) have been entertaining me in the mornings for the past week. Some critter (and those are the two most obvious suspects) is dropping acorns on the roof and watching them roll down the side of our steep roof. I’m not sure if they’re just collecting in the gutters, or if said critter is gathering them up and then storing them somewhere for the winter, but the critter seems to like his or her acorns distressed some how. I’m guessing that the rolling cracks the acorn some how, but I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that each morning for about 15 minutes, I can listen to the sound of acorns rolling down the roof. It’s a lively little sound, and delightful for its brevity. If the acorns were rolling all day long, I ‘d probably go batty. And, no, the acorns are not just falling from the tree on to the roof, because we’ve got no oak trees, or any other tree for that matter, close enough to drop things on our roof.

The neighbors have aspen trees, but they only spread shade on our solar panels, and on the other side we’ve got one red maple tree, whose initial purpose was to shade the house to help keep it cool. Luckily for us, it’s never done the growing it was supposed to do. Now we’ve got solar panels up there on that roof it was planted to shade, so we’d either be hacking down the tree, or just bemoaning the fact that we weren’t getting as much use out of our panels. As it is, it’s staying small, though incredibly beautiful. In a week or two the tree will look like it’s on fire for about three days and then drop all its leaves.

I plan to enjoy that sight as much as I can, while it is here.

In the meantime, I’m loving the crisp, clear air of autumn.

Go out and breathe some of that fragrance in. It’s lovely!

I’m outta here, gotta go breathe in my trees.

SongMom