The weather bureau is predicting rain today, although I have my doubts. The BOM* site is not uncommonly wrong.

I draw the crimson curtains, allowing the sun to make a filtered, golden entrance to the lounge room. It’s 10 a.m. and the windows face east. So even though the clouds are piled skywards, someone with a grey crayon continues to stain them darker. The winter wind is blowing them away from me. It’s fairly plain, despite official prognostications, that we will miss the main deluge that’s drowning most of Sydney.

I don a worn-out sloppy joe**, grab gloves and hoe and spade, and go out through the back door of the laundry to the garden. Brussels sprouts and broccoli, peas and beans, still growing green and starting to show signs they await harvesting. Loose-leafed lettuce and leeks, onions and beets, plod on past their best - plucked today or passed by until tomorrow.

Dandelions yellow surrounding beds. Catsear creates hairy-leaved havoc, conceals layers of three-leaved clover - I'll never be lucky enough to find a four. Burrweed creep alongside the serrated edges of cudweed, and always beware the bite of bindiis. Weeks of wet weather, turned on and off like a sprinkler, have created a heaven for interlopers.

Weeding wastes my time, but I can make them responsible and blame them for my grief, rip them out with rage. No one can witness my tears, abortively attempt to offer comfort, as I water the plants. Produce or intruder all equally blessed by my salty, lachrymose offerings.

Somehow the clouds seem somber too, disconsolate, weeping heavily, for my hair is wet and not from overflying lorikeets or raucous sulphur-crested cockatoos who seek the shelter of dense leaved blue gums that guard the southern fence.

The scientists got it right today. I am deluge-drenched and overwhelmed.
 

                                   6 May 2024