Babe

April showers are unusual in San Jose. They spritz up even Babe's muffler shop. That's Babe to the right, I believe.

After the rain

We got a mid-April splash after the driest January-March on record... the plants and lichens at Russian Ridge and Skyline Ridge were reveling in the moisture. The flowers are near their peak... not bad for a dry year. And why had I never noticed the mortar holes at Skyline Ridge? Folks lived in this spectacular place for many generations.

Rain and rhyme

We sure needed the stuff...

The Cycle
Theodore Roethke (1941)

Dark water, underground,
Beneath the rock and clay,
Beneath the roots of trees,
Moved into common day,
Rose from a mossy mound
In mist that sun could seize.

The fine rain coiled in a cloud
Turned by revolving air
Far from that colder source
Where elements cohere
Dense in the central stone.
The air grew loose and loud.

Then, with diminished force,
The full rain fell straight down,
Tunneled with lapsing sound
Under even the rock-shut ground,
Under a river’s source,
Under primeval stone.

Foothills Park after the rain

Every winter I hope to stumble across one of these—Hericium coralloides—on a hike in the foothills; this is the first in several years, thanks to the recent generous rains, I suppose. It is the loveliest of fungi. It does resemble its namesake coral, or to my eye a delicate calcite formation in a cavern. But in fact it is soft and rubbery, and supposedly quite delicious. Identification is pretty foolproof, so I would not hesitate to take one home for the skillet, were it not too beautiful to pick.

You can almost hear the vegetation slurping up the water, which gives the forest and chaparral a kind of radiance, even before many of the plants have leafed out.

Slurp... slurp...

... OK, maybe you can't really hear the trees sucking up all that water. But it's hard not to project a sense of relief, even exuberance, as one walks through misty Huddart County Park after a week of plentiful rain.