The Rains

Seattle has experienced such a dry winter that the governor of the state has already issued a drought warning.

The past three days have seen something of a deluge here, with heavy showers coming down from the great Pacific Northwest skies instead of the usual Seattle drizzle. When I first moved here, someone described the rain as spit. And that's what we normally see in wintertime: the gray Seattle sky will spit intermittent drizzle off and on all day.

But not this past winter. We've had plenty of magnificent sunshine and very little snow in the mountains, and the region is expected to pay for it this summer.

This was my planned summer for a glorious, golf course-quality front lawn. I had been reading up on lawn care, and had even considered hiring an expensive lawn care service to trim, mow, fertilize, aerate and pamper my lawn until fall. And I would keep the sprinklers going daily. (I was even going to give up espresso just to fund the expected astronomically high water bills this summer.)

But the county is already talking about a moratorium on lawn watering this summer.

I suppose I will have to settle for brown patches of dead grass and spots of bare soil in my front yard. It should be fertile ground for wretched dandelions, however. Which, when I think about it, is perhaps not all that bad. At least the dandelions may lend a certain greenness to the lawn when the grass itself cannot.