Sometimes you're challenged to bring light and warmth into your home when the natural world around you has gone dark. And when it rains, it tends to do just that. Though colours are intensified outside, particularly where colours dominate as in a garden, gloom settles into the interior and everything seems somewhat stultified.

You can always put lights on, listen to music and wait for the deep humidity and the rain to disappear. Or you can actively do things that lighten your mood. I chose to invest some time this morning in preparing an evening dessert, and set about making a lemon meringue pie, a delectable meal-ending I haven't thought of in ages.

We've little reason to complain about last evening's rain. Or that the rain came down persistently and hard throughout the night. Or that, though there was only a slight drizzle left by morning, the humidity was so all-pervasive, it might have been raining.

The garden doesn't mind. We'd had a full day of unobstructed sunlight two days earlier, and yesterday the sun shone most of the day. Until it no longer did. But the combination of rain and sun does wonders for the garden.

Unfortunately, not so much for arable land that becomes so waterlogged it is not possible for farmers to plant seed. And those fields that have been planted now hosting growing crops leave farmers in despair because the unrelenting rain has led to rot and there will be little to harvest this fall.

The forest doesn't seem to mind. And the grass on our lawns has become so accustomed to ongoing rain that when it stops for a day and misses, the lawns instantly take on that parched look. Amazing. In the woods, the wildflowers constantly nourished by the most important elements in nature's growing season, are doing spectacularly well. Yesterday we came across pussy-toes beginning to flower, the first of this season.

So that too brings a spring to our step this summer awaiting fall, not even thinking about winter.