There is something fiercely gratifying about hearing a sump pump working below you, every four or five minutes motoring from the basement bowels, and then the spilling waters leaving what could have occupied your house, bound for the filtering of soil and sand and rock. I have been listening to that sound all day, glad …
There is something fiercely gratifying about hearing a sump pump working below you, every four or five minutes motoring from the basement bowels, and then the spilling waters leaving what could have occupied your house, bound for the filtering of soil and sand and rock.
I have been listening to that sound all day, glad we put in the pump after last spring’s 6 inches of standing water in our basement that took out the whole of what was once the Rec Room. I like rain. I am the daughter of farm people. I know the power of “a good rain.”
“We need the rain” was the solution to many soggy Saturdays in my youth. And the phrase I used to justify my children’s last week. It’s a sales pitch. And in forest fire terrain, it’s something they understand not unlike like the children of corn and soy bean farmers in Illinois.
But I didn’t expect the rain I got just now, in my house, not from a leaking gutter or a high water table, but from my own doing. I ran my bath, water on water, and went outside to photograph the dripping garden. I had on tennis socks and pocketed them into flip flops—very fashionable. Who cares. I live in rural Montana. And there is a world outside to behold.
I love how water plays on flowers.
On the fuzz of poppies, 
the palms of lupine,
the folds of ladies mantle.
And when I returned to the warmth and dry of my house, there was the sound of sump pump. Only not where I was used to it motoring away all day. It was somewhere central and wrong. I listened and waited. My son yelled, “Mommy, it’s raining in the kitchen!” And it was. I’d overflown the bathtub!
My socks are very wet now. And my pride too. This is a very wet day.
