mountain dew on a wild rose

I have this photo stretch across my desktop wallpaper right now. I took it a few weeks back, on the way up the holler to checking the spring box, but keep it because it has moisture in it.
Our little town declared a water rationing program this week and while hunkering down in front of the paper box outside Lafayette family foods to read the article through the glass, a puzzle was answered for me.
I allus wondered where their city water comes from, it comes from springs, just like my water. The water commisioner said they is just down to a trickle, so folks should stop washing cars and you can't fill up your swimming pool and here it is just now not even July, but don't go getting alarmed or anything. It is the driest year on record for our county. They do get a little water from up over the state line in Kentucky from the Barren river, but that is only 1/3 or the need.
My plan was to buy city water and wash out of a bucket when my spring finally dies, but now I can see that I need another plan.

we had rain! and intimate frogs

ok, so not even enough to wet the ground under stones, but any moisture is welcome when you are 17 inches behind normal.
My sister called last night and read to me the most wonderful poem about drought and frogs, and I hope she will record herself reading it, so that I can link to it and share it, she has a great recitation voice.
But the poem about the frog has forced me to post, even though there really isn't time for this blogging foolishness!

Frogs calling for rain has been going on up here in the holler, each time a cloud has broken the beat of the blazing sun. The frogs down in the creek and those that live in the frog bathtub by my workshop, tune up and sing at each overcasting cloud, then fade out at is moves on its way up into kentucky, passing us by in a depressing and dusty pattern.

Frogs are hard to photograph, but something I have learned from walking by the frog bathtub, to and fro to the the shop and glancing over at it, is that they often sit close together on the edge in the morning, in various intimate poses, as if they enjoy each others company (yea, I know, it is probably a temperature regulation thing) but I prefer to think that these two truly care.

3 things from 2 weeks past

since there is no time to blog now, here are three unposted things from early may....

The most beautiful, non-people thing I saw in Oklahoma was the scissor tail fly catcher. What a strange and wonderous bird, like a living, breathing kite fighting with the sunny wind over the lake.Early morning misty
Sunlight on the rice field.
Inverted furrows of curving irrigation mounds, two toned glowing and shadowed green. Looking like the serpentine mounds of an ancient culture, they are just modern agricultural features of the Arkansas river bottoms on the way to Memphis from Oklahoma.

A glance out the greyhound bus window looks level and directly across into the cab of an adjacent semi truck. It finds the driver blending himself a breakfast drink. The puree is just at the stage of adding the banana and he juggles the steering wheel with his knees and deftly, without a splash, operates the battery powered hand held mixer.
It generates amusement and hungrification for the 3-more-hour-away destination and the first chance to eat something more than banana chips and almonds from the bottom of the knitting bag.