by 
Approximately 570,306 gallons of rain have fallen on SA since Wednesday night. Usually when we get rain — if we get rain — it comes with a thunderstorm, which is often accompanied by high winds and even hail. But this rain has been as benign as one could hope for. In the wee hours of Sunday morning we got another inch and a half on top of the two inches we’d collected over the preceding few days. Neither of us was aware it was even raining, so gently did if fall. It goes without saying this is the answer to our prayers and according to the forecast we’re not done yet.
Since it was too wet to plow Saturday, Joyce and I got busy and cleaned out the garage, As garages do, ours had gotten drunk and disorderly and in need of correction. Rebecca came down and, um, helped for awhile, until she wanted to go home with an umbrella we were discarding. We did manage to turn loose of some items while others just wound up going to the loft above the shop. Regardless, we were pretty pleased with the results, and ourselves.
Abigail recently went before the school board to get an attagirl for being one of 12 students, I presume in her peer group, in the state doing well on the SAT test. She qualified to take the SAT because of her score on the state STAR test, whatever that is. This qualification had something to do with Duke University, I think, though I’m not sure what the connection is. Anyway, Abigail scored in the top quintile of all Texas SAT test takers, typically high school seniors, I think. I know Abigail is bright but I’m not sure how a 12-year-old amasses the knowledge to perform well on a test like the SAT by the seventh grade.
Unless it’s raining (seems funny to write that), we will visit the cemeteries Monday morning. This Memorial Day it will be much easier to collect a small bouquet of flowers to take out there, as is our custom. Among others, our Grady flowers are blooming profusely. They are some kind of native plant Grady Howard saw on a golf course somewhere around the area. He collected some seed and several years ago he gave Joyce half a dozen or so of the sprouts he’d started. She planted them in front of the kitchen window and they did nicely. They also reseeded themselves and took over the flowerbed, and we started calling them Grady weeds. The following year I think it was, we removed them from that bed but either planted some or some grew volunteer underneath the juniper next to the driveway. A year or two later they had expanded and put on a nice display. Remembering how they took over the other bed, I pulled them up in the fall and for the last couple of years there have been only a handful that have managed to get by even without our watering them. I thought they were an annual but realized they weren’t and started watering them this spring. They have responded nicely. With this rain, they should really prosper. We planted snapdragons among them a month or so ago. It will take a year for the snaps to get big enough to show up much but when they do, they and the Grady flowers, which is what we call them now, should reward us with lots of color.
Tuesday I kicked off my shoes and stepped gingerly into the pond to pull up cattails and the pond grass that grows along the edges. Between those two and the moss, there was no open water, and thus no ducks. I learned last year to keep on top of the vegetation lest I suffer remorse for having let it go. I reduced the cattails to something aesthetically appealing but limited and did the same to the grass. I also raked out the moss. None of this was too bad because I got to it before it got overgrown. A day or two later the mallard drake was back after an absence of at least a couple weeks. The rain no doubt has put water in the playas, giving the water fowl many more options than before, so it remains to be seen whether we’ll see much of our duck friends going forward.