So I’m a bit of a closet meteorologist. I come by it naturally, I think, from my grandfather, who was obsessed by the weather. As a Vermont farmer in the early 1900’s, he had a right to be worried about too much or too little weather at the right or wrong times, but he took it just a little too far. I’ve seen him dash out onto the porch in the middle of the night in a howling snowstorm in just his slippers to check the thermometer on the wall, to see if it was forty below yet, or still just negative thirty-nine. If he were still living, he’d have a personal weather station in every room, and would check back and forth between them to compare the differences between the weather in the front yard and the weather out back.
I’m not quite that bad (okay, I do have one weather station in the kitchen and one in my writing room, but that’s just so I don’t have the excuse to leave my desk to go and check — more writing that way, see? — and I have a rain gauge, but only one! Right now there’s exactly an inch of new rain since I left the house this morning, and our brook is on the rise again. Our little brook, one of those idyllic ones that winds through fields, trickles down a rock cascade, and is perfect for sitting and thinking beside, can turn into a raging mountain torrent and wash out the road and our culvert in under an hour with the right conditions. It gives a whole new meaning to being glad to get home, and since our road dead ends just past our house, it can give us a forced vacation at its slightest whim.
Vermont had a record setting amount of rainfall in April, and right now, our largest lake is at an historical high.
This is the same island, from the same spot, this weekend. The lake is about six feet higher, and very muddy. It’s pretty amazing. I’ve never seen it like this before. My grandfather would be beside himself.
And it’s supposed to rain all week. Vermont is never dull!