thunderstorm all day

thunderstorm all day --

white ice marbles hopping,

brown water floods the creek

"April showers bring May flowers," so the saying goes. But today, all day, it's been an April thunderstorm. Thunder wakes me around 5 in the morning. Then in mid-morning the sound of heavy rain on the roof changes and I look out to see white ice marbles hopping around as they hit the green grass like small white grasshoppers. During the hail storm, I count the interval between lightning and the loud thunderclap -- only one second. On the way home I stop to watch the glut of brown water flooding over the banks of Pilgrim Creek, engulfing trees and spreading out into the surrounding fields. Bedtime and it's still raining.
          

Rain all night and again today, though much lighter than yesterday. All the farm ponds, half empty from the drought last summer, are now overflowing. The shore end of the bridge to the little island on Adam's Pond is submerged, but the big water-guzzling willow, chartreuse leaves trailing in the water, looks delighted.

after the deluge

after the deluge,

new bridge across the creek,

gift of floodwater

Pilgrim Creek keeps overflowing its banks. After this morning's deluge, the flood waters deposited a 2x12 piece of lumber, laying it neatly across the creek, anchored by a tree on either side. The angle is a little steep for large animals like myself, but the squirrels will love it, as long as they don't slip on the mucky surface. They're saying the flooding is worse than the Kansas-Missouri Flood of 1951, the Great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers Flood of 1993 or Iowa's Katrina Flood of 2008. It just keeps raining and raining, sometimes a deluge for an hour or two, sometimes just a heavy mist all day. I know a man who grew up in Mossyrock, Washington, in the rain forest between the Pacific coast and the Cascade mountains. The mountains not far inland stop the rain from the ocean from going any further east. Nothing ever got dry and you had to fight your way through gigantic wild blackberry bushes. As soon as he left home he moved to the dry side of the mountains. It's beginning to feel that way here, like the Pacific rain forest, or maybe like Ireland. Everything is green, green, green and wet, wet, wet. The paths in the woods run with water like little creeks or they're filled with mud-bottom pools. It's been great for the berry bushes: strawberries, wild black raspberries, currants, blueberries. Impossible to keep up with weeding, though. The silver lining? Definitely not necessary to water the garden, it's a cinch to pull the weeds up by the roots from the soggy soil and the compost pile is growing gargantuan.

reflection of tree

reflection of tree

leaning over the flooding

creek after the storm

Another thunderstorm. More flood warnings in central and southeast Iowa. Fortunately, we do not live close to a river, and our usually tranquil Pilgrim Creek lies way at the bottom of the wooded hills. This tree has been leaning out from the bank for a long time, all of its limbs growing upward toward the light, like fingers raised in praise of the sun, doubled by their reflection in the water. With the flooding, the base of the trunk is now submerged a couple of feet under muddy water. The fast-moving current continues to erode the bank, and some day the roots of the tree will be washed free and the heavy trunk will fall across the creek. If the tree is not utterly uprooted, it will continue to grow in that fallen position, its arms still upraised, its trunk a living bridge for light-footed creatures to cross over.