April Showers Bring May Flowers. Maybe.

The skies over Fort Worth have been dark and threatening for a few days now - and yet there's no rain. I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland every time I look at the clouds:
"Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie or sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain".

My parents are glad right now that they invested a fortune in my Baylor education so I can rattle off modern British lit while looking at the clouds and comptemplating meteorology. Bottom line kids - there's no money in the arts.

All this to say Wilson's been pulling his weight around the house trying to keep our flowers watered. He so badly wants to play outside with his umbrella in the rain, but there's no rain. Sometimes he gets a big smile on his face and says "I think I hear thunder." But again - no rain. We only want the rain though - no more tornadoes blowing over huge trees in the yard. Just rain.

Chris' parents visted this weekend. They were kind enough to help do some yardwork; shopping for annuals, planting annuals, chopping a root, levelling ground where the tree fell over last summer, laying down grass. The best part was that Nana kept Wilson busy on the other side of the yard, so no one (Wilson) was lifting our tools and playing with them. If you have to do yardwork with a 3 year old, you absolutely need to get yourself a Nana. You will accomplish a ton and there will be no whining. I take that back - there was whining. Chris was whining around 11 pm that night because he was a little achy. And I was a little whiny at the same time because I was a little cut up from trying to prune a bush near our roses. But the important thing is that there was no child whining. And for that we are deeply grateful to Pawpaw and Nana. They will probably never come visit again, but our yard looks really nice. :)

Seems I have mastered the art of rain making. Early this morning I saved the first paragraphs as drafts. This afternoon the skies opened up and the thunder produced rain... And hail. While the rain was a help, the hail most certainly killed my flowers. So either I wasn't meant to have the pretty flowers I planted this weekend, or, if you quote section 5, What the Thunder Said from "The Wasteland" you will get your rain. And some hail.