It’s spring in Central Texas. The wild fla’rs are a’bloomin’, and the highways are jammed with parked cars alongside the road. Everyone is taking photographs with their cell phones of their baby or their girlfriend in just that perfect patch of Bluebonnets (the Texas state flower of which there are no less than six subspecies). The Mexican cliff swallows have returned with their aerial acrobatics. Sweeping around the front of the house catching flies and “skeeters,” they’re building mud nests in the porch ceiling. That way we get to watch their babies grow up. We also get dive bombed whenever we go out the front door!Spring brings a certain kind of rain as well.

A newcomer once asked a native what the weather was like here.  

The Native Texan answered, “There’s three seasons: the dry season, the wet season and the rainy season.” 

Newcomer asks, “So how do you tell the wet season from the rainy season?” 

The answer, “Wait, you’ll see!”

It happens almost every year that the rain turns off July first, like closing a spigot. Then, except for an occasional autumn rain, the drizzle doesn’t “set in” ‘til mid December, but it stays! I remember one winter we didn’t see the sun for nearly two months. That’s the wet season. Mud. Sticky, slick mud. Then in March we have gorgeous sunny days, the grass comes up, the flowers bloom, and just when you’re all saddled up for the picnic trail ride, the black clouds boil up and a half hour of torrential downpour floods the barn aisle with raindrops as big as bullets, and as cold as ice! When it’s over, the sun breaks out, there’s a magnificent rainbow in the east and the grass sparkles like diamonds. That’s the rainy season!