Cinnamon Fern

When I first moved to Columbia, South Carolina, it seemed to rain most afternoons just as I was scheduled to get off work at 4:30 p.m. My young daughter finally asked me if it was like this all the time. I told her I didn’t know but surely felt the green moss growing rapidly up my body.

In more recent years the weather took a turn toward the dry side. Mowing the lawn was like walking through a dust storm until the last couple of weeks. Now we have returned to sudden thunderstorms late in the afternoon and evening. Some of these storms have been full of 40 mile an hour wind gusts and hail to go along with the rain.

The wind is quite a problem with most of our utility lines strung along every street and highway. It does not take much to wrench a branch out of one of the many pine trees that line our streets. Luckily it is a quick fix for the power company most of the time.

On the plus side our plants and gardens are loving the addition of fresh rain from the skies and not from our city water supply. Many are the times I wish we had installed a well when we first purchased this home. It would have come in handy and saved me a lot of bucks over the years.

The next item of purchase will be a new self-propelled lawn mower so I won’t have to depend on the son up the street to mow not only his grass but mine as well. He is in that transitional stage with his oldest child graduating from high school and the other entering high school in the fall. Those were the days.