Rain and Wild Pumpkins

This is one of our wild pumpkins the pigs planted.  They are all different shapes, but this one looks like a pure Seminole pumpkin to me.  Other ones have longer necks, and you can tell they are also something else...trombocino?  Tahitian melon?

It's growing, loving all the rain we're getting.  The past week has been an immersion in different types of rain.  Mostly it has been one kind of rain - biblical rain.  The kind that lasts for forty days and forty nights.  The pastures are thriving.  I'm not sure I've experienced storms this way before at any other time in my life.  There's something very intimate about being stuck outside in the weather - you see the inside of the storm, the guts and bones and filmy membranes.

These storms have been intense.  Intense rain, intense wind, intense lightening and thunder.  I've never been exposed to it so much before.  Yes, it usually rains alot in the summer - and we often get drenched.  These storms seem more ferocious than usual.

When you're out there, the rain, the storm closes everything.  It's just you in a small, small, wild world.  The birds are hiding, the animals are hiding, the butterflies and flies are hiding.  The ants are hiding, and you think, what the hell am I doing out here? But the darkness is closing in all around, every moment the earth tilts farther away from the light, and there are things that must be done, even as the world shines yellow-green in the weird pearly storm-light, you have to keep going.

You have to keep going, swimming ahead through the silver, thrumming curtain of rain, between the trees flickering and flashing, the lightening cracking across the whole sky, searching the earth....looking for you?  The thunder rolls around and around, the dripping leaves tremble on the trees, you tremble, even the sodden, squooshy earth quakes.  It's very dramatic.  You feel alone with the world, fighting your way through, streaming wet.