For the past week or so it became clear that the forest was beginning to suffer withdrawal symptoms. It had become too accustomed to constant rainfall. Mind, it took the forest floor some time to adjust its capacity to absorb all that precipitation on top of the snowmelt in early spring, leaving us with the indelible impression that we were walking through a swampland on our daily treks through the forest trails.

Eventually the ground managed to absorb it all, though there were enough places where pools of rainwater gathered and just wouldn't allow themselves to be absorbed by the already-saturated ground. More latterly, we first noticed cracks appearing in the forest floor about a week and a half ago. Now that we're in summer we certainly haven't had a rain deficit.

Rain keeps refreshing itself and the atmosphere on a fairly regular basis. Even so, nothing like the constant torrents we had become wearily accustomed to over the spring and early summer. The grass on our lawns have noticed the difference, as brown areas began to appear in lock-step with the cracks on the forest floor. We spoil our lawns but not to the extent that was once done when people took absurd pride in having fastidiously even, green-manicured lawns.

Most of the lawns on the street are still kept in good shape, but almost as many residents have engaged in a more utilitarian view that the lawns can look after themselves. No one likes to pluck weeds and so weeds have colonized lawns. Actually weed control isn't difficult as long as one keeps up with it, plucking them out by the root while there are still but few growing on the lawn. Left to their own devices the plucky little plants will simply keep replicating until they suffuse the lawn.

When we went out early yesterday morning with the intention of getting out before the day's heat set in, it was heavily overcast, extremely humid, with no breeze and just a hint of heat build-up. So we had a lovely traipse-about with Jackie and Jillie through the forest. Noting as we did, the wilted look of many of the shrubs and wildflowers. Knowing that there was a high probability of thunderstorms the coming afternoon, one of the additional reasons that propelled us out early.

Knowing also how welcome rain would be to the landscape. Everything would pick up in celebration of needed irrigation. It had been -- let's see -- at least a week since the last downpour. By three in the afternoon we began to hear warning rumbles. Before that, we were enjoying ourselves sitting out on the deck. It's the only time Jackie and Jillie really want to be out on the deck, when we're there, too.

And then the rain splashed down, tentatively at first and then with increasing intensity as the thunderclaps alarmed Jackie and Jillie into barking at this intrusion into the peaceful afternoon. It not only rained, it teemed. Wind had picked up substantially and hurled the rain against the house as it came down in veritable buckets. And eventually the rain stopped.

But that didn't last long before yet another even more robust thunderstorm clapped its presence in the dark afternoon sky. It hardly seemed like we were in daylight hours for the remainder of the day. This storm brought down even greater gushes of unstoppable rain, and we could only imagine the tumult in the creek down below in the ravine, and the pounding that the forest floor was experiencing, with all the vegetation lapping up the water at first, then lying prostrate under the full force of the wind and the accumulating driving rain.

The impact of the rain was so ferocious that even the garden pots on our porch were inundated to the point where the plants began looking not refreshed but exhausted. Just as well nature has designed them to fully recover once the clouds clear out and the sun resumes its summer vigil.