It Rained!

 It rained! I heard it! 

I woke up early this morning, looked out the window, and all was dry. Mind you, I couldn't see much that early, but the streets do deflect the lights ever so faintly from the neighbor's porches to our window facing the street, even in the darkest night. Especially in the darkest night, where aside from the shine of wet pavement all is black except any lights left on overnight.  With no street lights here, barring a passing car those porch lights separate us from solid black. The doubled bright lights signify wet roads. They work even better once it snows, unless, of course, those neighbors decide to become snowbirds and head south over the winter, like we used to, and set their porch lights to "off".

But there was no glow, and I needed to hit the bathroom, the next first thing on my morning list. Now two bathrooms in a two-person house may seem a luxury. Try it yourself when both are near or past 80. Patience is a memory. Neither bathroom has a window in it, which affords us both privacy. Both have a skylight in the ceiling, which affords us their use without turning on a light to inform any nosy sleepless neighbor about our very personal habits.

Aside from privacy, those skylights also give us enough light to find our way around those two tiny rooms in complete safety. It's never completely dark here with a square sheet of glass allowing light in from the sky. In the right conditions I can see stars. (I do have to stand half in the tub and look straight up, of course. Nobody thought to put them in a more practical place for stargazing.) Even in cloudy conditions there is still light coming through since there are no real Dark Skies here, five blocks from downtown, tiny as it is, and 40-50 miles from some location in the Twin Cities. We finally found real Dark Skies a few years back, dark enough to see the actual galaxy instead of a very occasional fuzzy home hint of ... something... even when we also could make out the Big Dipper and Orion on our "clearest" nights. I remember taking pride once in being able to count nine stars in Pleiades, not just seven. That revealing, mind-boggling, actual galaxy-the-way-the-serious-photographers-caught-it spot was over 1200 miles away from here as the car flies. 

FYI that's not the way I drive, of course! Honest, Mr. Policeman!

This morning in the wee hours, when the house is as silent as a house can get with two clocks that tick each second and with two humans in it who have achieved that point in life where sleep never arrives on a schedule, much less each other's schedule, I heard raindrops hit the top of my skylight. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Silence, such as it is here, resumed. WE HAD RAIN! So it was only five drop hitting a skylight, so what? It was rain! I poked my head out a door a few minutes later. Streets and sidewalks were dry. That didn't matter. 

WE'D HAD RAIN! 

I'll be heading out later in the morning to put the hose on the gardens. The flowers need it before a frost eventually arrives. They wouldn't believe me if I told them it had already rained in the night. They keep telling me we're having a drought.