City people might look at rain as a nuisance. Country people don’t usually. This necessary rain waters gardens, grows pastures and woods and brings up mushrooms.
The lack of and the abundance of rain are the mainstays of rural conversation. Here in my part of the Ozarks both conditions have been topics this summer.
Local Focus
News is reporting on both ends of the rain spectrum lately. New England is flooding. The Southwest is dry and being cooked.
These reports are disturbing. Even the reports of similar problems in Europe and Asia are concerning.
However, my focus is here. I rarely go even thirty miles from home. This is my world. I do sympathize as such weather, to a degree, has come here. But the reports are for far away places I will never visit. I live here.
Heat and Drought
Last summer saw temperatures over a hundred here along with dry weather. Hay fields burned up, including mine. Hay prices soared, if I could find any.
My goats survived on mulch status hay and cold pastures over the winter. The garden lasted into early winter under plastic with well water and mulch.
Cool and Rainy
This summer has stayed cool, rarely seeing even ninety degrees. A couple of days flirted with the hundred degree mark during a dry spell.
Now clouds cover the sky for days. They don’t drop a lot of rain, but enough for make the pastures lush.
Hay is still a problem and the prices are still high. First it got too dry and burned the fields. Now the necessary rain falls and it’s too cool and wet to make hay.
How Does This Matter?
In my world, this matters a lot. This is where I live, where my goats live, where my garden is.
For the people living in other places, enduring weather so much worse than I am seeing, it doesn’t matter. What matters is their local weather because that is where they live.