Passing over one dry river bed after another in the West, and still recovering from our own drought in the Southeast, the rain, always a welcome sight these days, is even more treasured, for in each precious drop there is nourishment. No living thing survives without water. Water is life. In our space exploration, it’s what we seek first when we hope to find other potential current or former celestial life.

For the few minutes I was home this morning before heading to work, I peered out my bathroom window at the weeping cherry I planted some four years ago at a mere three feet tall. At the end of last summer it stood tall in the middle with a few weeping offshoots, nearing perhaps twelve feet in height. It now towers over the deck, having gained at least another foot during our wet Spring. Today, I would swear it’s grown another two feet since I last gazed at it, using each rain in an attempt to wrest more share of the sun hoarded by the tall oak that shadows it and the entire right-most portion of our garden.

The peach tree planted with only meager hopes that it might live to supply edible fruit one day, it too is thriving in our wet Spring. Last year, its branches too weak to hold much weight, bore only one peach (whose pit I saved as a momento of our first peach). Today, the strong branches are weighty with many round blossoms. We watch them with anticipation, the tree clinging to and nurturing each one, growing it’s circumference little by little. like a mother grows a baby, letting it expand according to nature’s clock protected in her womb. Soon, we hope, we will have free peaches, sweet and delicious as they only are when allowed to ripen to maturity on the tree, enough to accompany a meal, enough for pies, enough for the wildlife. The Yoshino Cherries in the front garden, which I assumed to be only ornamental, are likewise ripening to bear free, fresh, untainted fruit.

Last year, there was not enough water. We lost rhodendrons. We lost hydrageas. We lost hundreds of dollars of hostas. This year, the rains return and with them, the life that cannot exist without them. The rain is magnificent and we so blessed by the frequency and relative dependability with which it comes.