After the Rain in a Dry Garden

by Kelly

There are about eight billion songs titled 'After the Rain' on YouTube. Queue up your favorite and take a walk in the garden with me.

Chokecherry? Black Cherry?

Soloman's Seal

Chicory

After the rain, the birds came out of hiding. I hadn't realized that they weren't singing anymore until they started again.

Speaking of wildlife, we have some seriously strange squirrels around here. There are about six or seven of them that seem to run in a pack. This pack makes a regular morning trip, a few times a week, from one bank of trees to another, at about eight in the morning when I'm hanging laundry on the line. The weird part is, they run across the yard together to do this, looking a lot like a bunch of Meerkats. They could easily travel through the tree branches to get where they're going, but they don't. I have tried a few times to get a picture of this behavior, but they're way too fast and blend perfectly into the dry, brown grass.

Their destination is a line of trees that contains a few oaks and one huge, old walnut tree. Since there is already a squirrel's nest in that walnut tree, I can only imagine that these guys are poaching in someone else's territory. And that could be why they travel together, so they can get away with this. But why do they run across the lawn? That has to be dangerous for them. Then again, the previous owners of this house never, ever had pets, so generations of squirrels have grown up here without being chased by dogs.

Things might get interesting in the fall, when all those acorns and walnuts are finally ripe. I'm hoping for a massive squirrel battle that I can record and post on YouTube to earn my fifteen minutes of Internet fame.

Anyway, enough David Attenborough type stuff. Let's hope that this little bit of rain saved some of the plants. Especially the local farmer's corn and beans. The crops have failed in the rest of Illinois, but our county still has a chance.