What Grows in the Rain

I seem to remember from sophomore botany that rain makes things grow, an axiom I'm proving true this weekend.  It has been raining since Saturday night, and there's a lot of growth going on here in my little world in downtown Portland Maine.  Unfortunately I'm not growing carefully cultivated cucumbers or a well-landscaped garden, the longed-for fruits of my labor.  No, I'm growing problems, disasters, leaks, and green growth in all the wrong places, which I'm afraid will require oodles more labor to repair.

The yard is bad enough. The lilacs and peonies, once designed into a symmetrical array around the edges of my lawn (a layout developed by the former owner, which I'm sure is obvious), now lean heavily over onto the grass, the sidewalk and my parking space, right in front of the driver's side door, guaranteeing me a soaking every time I climb into my car's front seat.

The lawn, patchy in the first place like a young boy's face -- stretches of unadorned territory interspersed with startling dense growth -- has become even more unsightly and, worse, unmowable.  The grass is so tall and waterlogged it winds its way into the blades of my push mower, causing it, then me, to stop short, every foot or so -- so far I've managed to avoid catapulting over the handle.  I've sent the mower in to have the blades sharpened but with the grass up over my ankles in spots, I'm thinking I'll soon need a scythe to make my away from one side of the lawn to the other.

Then there's the house.  A couple of weeks ago my tenant reported that the door to nowhere on her second floor was leaking -- well, really gushing -- water when it rained.  I told her to stick some towels against it until I could find the $1000 or so it will cost to repair or replace it.  I haven't had the nerve to check in with her this weekend -- I'm just hoping her towel supply is holding up and, if not, she has a dinghy.  

Over on our side, things are headed downstream too.  After I put an exhausted Kanha to bed on Saturday night, I sat on the couch in the family room, appreciating a moment of quiet before I turned the TV on to catch up on Mad Men. (An hour observing the emotionally disconnected, misogynist world of Don Draper always reminds me that life in the 21st century isn't so bad after all...)  But it wasn't so quiet within those four family room walls -- instead of silence, I heard "drip drip drip...," emanating from my centuries old fireplace.  Now I remembered -- when I had had the house inspected a couple of years ago, some concern about the two chimneys had been noted.  Apparently willful ignorance is just not enough to solve the problem.

Some day soon it will stop raining -- that's what I've been told anyhow -- and the problems will dry up, at least a bit.  We'll put our towels and buckets and watercraft away and maybe even, this time, I'll fill in the holes, cut back the grass, mower or scythe, whatever it takes, and be ready for when the rainy growing season comes again.  Remember, I said maybe.