It's Raining!

Wow! Someone sure did a great rain dance, all of Arizona is getting rain! I've been under a food haze since Thanksgiving, I think, and the last week has just sped by. I can't think of anything else that's happened, except I've been anxiously watching the news and Weather channel, hoping that this storm wouldn't pass us by the way so many have. We haven't really had rain since mid-August. There were a couple sprinkles, but they only spattered the dust around on the car. Today is awesome- I could smell the rain in the air as I was barely coming to consciousness this morning. My mind was drifting out of sleep as my nose whiffed a... sort of freshness as the furnace kicked on. As the scent pushed its way into my brain, I realized it was rain! Then my senses took in the joy of moisture in the atmosphere, it took little time to perk up.

It is still raining, or misting, for the past 14 hours. It's such a thrill for we desert rats to have rain, moisture, whatever wet comes our way. When we lived in Colorado, there were clouds and real weather on a regular basis. The standard saying was "if you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes." It was absolutely true- I've seen it snow in the morning, change to sleet or hail, rain and clear up to beautiful skies in a matter of hours. But here, in the desert southwest, rain is a precious thing. Growing up on a ranch in Yavapai county, the standard phrase was -We can use a little more rain. Even if it had just poured!
Now that brings me to a story. We lived in Copper Basin, and Copper Creek was our neighbor. Most of the time, it was a sleepy little trickle meandering down the wash. Sometimes it wasn't even above the sand, you'd have to dig down into the sand to find water. But, let it rain a while and life changed. During the monsoons, many times we'd drive home, only to find the wash flooded completely- 40-50 feet wide. We would be stuck on the wrong side of the creek, waiting for the water to drop enough to get across. Once the water went down, we still had to deal with the drop-off it had created. The water would cut the sand down a foot or more, sometimes up to three feet. The road would just drop into the creekbed. If we were in the truck, not too troubling, but Mom drove a van, and trying to get it up the other side of the cut was pretty tough.
The first time David came out to the ranch with me, it had been raining, and Mom came trudging up the road on foot. She couldn't get the van up from the crick, and had to walk to the house for help. It was at least a mile walk, in the dark. David had an old '69 Chevy short-bed sidestep 6 cylinder. (He told me that, I didn't remember!) We drove her down to the crick, strapped on a chain between the truck and the van, and darned if he didn't pull her out of that hole! My dad didn't think it was tough enough, but we did it. Earlier that day, my brother Hap got stuck on the wrong side of the creek when it flooded- he was horseback. We went to see if we could find him, and help him, but the water was too wide and deep, so he rode to the neighbor's house to stay until it dropped enough to get back across. Gee, and they wonder why I didn't come home very often from college!