Rainy days are good for some things

Generally, I don’t much like rainy days. But sometimes, especially in spring, they come as a welcome relief. Today, for example, if it had been sunny I would have been chomping at the bit to get outside and do some more clean up on the garden.

I’m not much of a gardener – I’d love to have a beautiful garden but I hate the work that has to go into it, work that seems to involve an inordinate amount of bending, pulling, lifting, tugging, lugging, wrestling, crouching, squatting, pushing, and other physically tortuous activities for this overweight, arthritic, aching body. (Somehow, hauling hay and building fences and scooping poop doesn’t seem half so tortuous!).

Yesterday morning, my friend Ellen helped me plant a couple of dozen little trees to form a privacy hedge between the driveway and the fence along the top of the piggy yard. There are several other plants and hedging trees waiting to be planted, as well as several emerging plants that need transplanting from an area where I had heeled them in over a year ago. And of course all those little newly planted trees need to be watered generously for the first little while.

So I was very glad to see the rain this morning – heavy rain gives me every excuse to ignore the plants for another day. Of course, the grass is growing longer by the minute and the weeds are already claiming their turf in every bare spot of soil in the flower beds…but the yardwork will still be there tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after when I get back to it.

Meanwhile, I am persuaded by both the rain and a pile of papers to stay indoors and mark student essays, maybe throw in a load of laundry, clean the house a little, get my taxes ready, catch up on much needed inside work.

Oh shoot…the rain just stopped and the sun is trying to peek through. There goes those good intentions. I do believe I hear the piglets, the plants, and the great outdoors calling me.