Rain

It rains nearly every day – very unusual for this time of year, we are told. This is the time of the first coffee harvest and most of the crop has been ruined. The second harvest takes place in about eight weeks and there is much hope that the entire year’s work will not be lost.

Mornings are sunny and then mid-day the clouds roll in and build through the afternoon. Rainstorms can be seen rolling our way across the valley below and we are quick to put things under cover. Sometimes it pours rain on one side of our house but not the other.

Hard rains thunder on our metal roof and we cannot hear each other without speaking loudly. Playing music is impossible. We haven’t experienced such rain before. We measure 4” overnight in the buckets – sometimes for a few nights in a row – one-fourth the annual rainfall in Fossil.

Pecos stays busy with a shovel, maintaining the shallow trenches that carry rainwater away from our house. This process is common as there are no gutters here. Our house perches inside a shallow moat all of three inches across. Wearing knee-high rubber boots, Pecos removes dams of sticks and leaves along the deeper, wider trenches by the driveway and up at the road. He is Michener’s Potato Brumbaugh, moving the waters of Costa Rica rather than Colorado. 