Ecclesiastes 3:1

April 24, 2013.  It is raining gently.

Winter being my least favorite season of all, I am usually chomping at the bit for Spring.  I can't wait.  I push the season.  I buy 'bedding plants' for the flower beds and vegetable plants for the vegetable gardens too early.  The last few years I have been on-line buying onion sets-- of all things -- way too early. 

I was my usual self in the spring of 2012.  I was buying flowers and vegetable plants. Himself dug out and enlarged the front flower bed and planted perennial early bloomers.  We were out every day, digging and tilling and planting. 

Then Spring came early.  It was 80 degrees in March.  Grandchildren swam in the Lake on March 30, so my journal says.  Himself and I jumped in and embraced that warm weather.  It quit raining.  We were in a drought.  or Drouth, my dad called it (an old-fashioned pronunciation found in the Bible). 

We were in Drouth all summer.

It was dry all fall.

The grass died or went dormant in northern Missouri and in southern Iowa.  The landscape was drab and brown.  The Lake level fell and the creeks were dry.  Even the Mississippi River was low and barges couldn't get up river.  Cracks drew their lines in the Iowa and Missouri dirt and clay and children speculated about digging to China. 

We worried all winter about the lack of moisture . . . but finally late winter 2013 it went to raining.  It rained and it didn't warm up.  If we did have a warm day or two, the temperature plummeted and it rained again.   Or snowed.  And rained.  And snowed again. 

Now it is April 24 (Happy Birthday, Maddie Mae!) and it is raining and the night time low will be about 30 degrees and I am thankful to be reminded ...

"To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven:  A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted."