One Magical Rainy Day

One Magical Rainy Day in May

There is nothing like a soft spring rain in early May to sharpen the images of every bursting crabapple or maple twig and leaf. Every year I celebrate a day like this by spending hours at my windows watching leaves appear while making periodic trips outdoors in the rain. 

Flowers literally glow. 

The Cloud People’s rain splashes over unfurling wood ferns covering the fronds in beads of silver.

 I am in and out soaking in each lemon and rose tipped leaf, burgundy bleeding hearts, mottled brown trout lilies, heart shaped violet clumps, peony shafts, fuzzy bronze Canada mayflowers even as I peer down at Solomon seal spikes breaking ground. By the end of this month every inch of this sweet earth outside my door will be covered in emerald and lime. Only hundreds of ephemeral wildflowers will provide stark contrast. I take picture after picture to record daily changes. Every year it’s the same. It happens too fast! 

One marsh marigold blossom just opened. Of all flowers, wildflowers are the most precious to me, perhaps this is why so many thrive in this small oasis, flowers that are so often ignored. Fragile wildflowers that are also the most vulnerable and are rapidly disappearing under a keening Earth that is still crying out to be seen as the sentient being S/he is…

I love my wild once cultivated garden just beyond the granite steps that surround the (basically) kidney shaped wildflower patch that surprises me each year by showing me her most recent boundaries! 

My old garden is just the right size (not too big), shaped like a gentle flowing wave with a hand built stone terrace above bursting with columbine. Bee balm and celandine rosettes creep out of the sides of each stone crack, cascading earthward. The best part is that I designed this space so I could sit on the porch and see the wildflower haven, the garden beyond, and still glimpse the pond with its (all too soon) masses of summery greenery that will protect emerging froglets from  predation.

Outdoors again I visit with the wood frog tadpoles feeling relief that they seem so healthy. I scatter bits of spinach and beet greens bringing hungry little ones to the surface. Yesterday I brought them some old reeds and algae filled water to supplement their diet after being led to  hidden vernal pool by a bittern.

Indoors the first passionflowers of the season have opened their petals; two blooms saturate the room with an indescribable citrusy fragrance. I can hear the hermit thrush trilling in the distance. 

Now I carefully remove and replace the week – old water from the tadpole aquarium. This year I am keeping a few wood frogs in the house since I will probably not be raising more. I add the rest of the detritus and algae filled water that I scooped up yesterday, while removing the old. Hopefully, every single one of these tadpoles will transform into a miniature masked bandit that I will release into my garden in a few weeks. 

Even if conditions are favorable and these days they are not, only about 4 percent of any egg mass will make it to adulthood, and the clutch that survived this year (only a quarter made it to the tadpole stage) is in the outdoor pond. I saw one wood frog all last summer, so years of raising them hasn’t changed the trajectory they are on.

For this magical May day I give thanks for being alive during a whirling changing moment in time.

 Just to experience the wonder that Nature offers to those of us who love Her is a gift.