the rain is pounding us. it's been coming down for about two months, more than double or triple what we usually get in a whole year. it washes down into the gullies and washes and down to the rivers - probably even the rio grande has water in it by now.

i see the rain a little differently from most people around here. they're used to it dry - a year or two without it, and they're still here, hanging on, not eating from a garden, maybe, but still eating, beef jerky or elk jerky or beans. they're tough. they can go years without water, but they aren't crazy about it when there's too much of it. in a place with bad soil or no soil, there's nowhere for the water to go, and that's trouble.

i feel like telling about my southern illinois days - about how the mighty mississippi would rise up and take whole towns and wash them down to new orleans. and about how this other river, called the big muddy - although that's what the mississippi itself was often called, informally - well this river did quite a bit of damage of its own. our tiny little county seat, murphysboro - was right on that big muddy river and it would get cleaned out. and i wanted to say that flood could be worse than fire - because when you have a couple feet of water on your floor, it's mostly mud and muck and every other foul thing. there's no cleaning it adequately, you might as well start over.

but i still remember the rain as a refreshing thing - it cleanses your soul, it takes dirt and grime that's been there for weeks, and washes it all down the way, like the laundry. when it's over things grow. the water is going back where it belongs - deep underground - where if we're not too greedy we'll leave some of there and stop fighting over it. i myself am glad that the earth is fighting back - as if it has taken it upon itself to deliver karma to every municipality that has abused it, one at a time. we have tried not to abuse it, but I'm not sure it agrees. we will probably not get washed away like murphysboro.

i like to say the spring behind my house is the seventeenth spring. our neighborhood is called sixteen springs, but i can hardly keep track of the springs around here, let alone know how many there really are. one neighbor says she has two, and they both have water this year, for the first time in years, and another neighbor says they have a spring too and it too came back. my spring, the seventeenth, comes out of the dry mountains and it has never come back. although maybe with all this rain, it will.

i've become obsessed with book marketing and ratings. i've been trying to keep those ratings real low by getting people to read the books. it's an interesting calculation. you watch the numbers amazon gives you for the success of your book, and anything under a million, i consider that success right off the bat. but it's not that simple, because they change every day, losing sometimes as much as five or six hundred thousand a week. you can't rest, or your books will sink in the charts.

the folks around here aren't big readers - i could go on doing this for quite a while, and they'd be none the wiser - although probably if you told them there was an author in their presence, they would take a shine to that. my overall impression is that it would be good to leave them in peace. covid is about to descend on their peaceful, mask-resistant environment, and it will probably pick up a few victims based on what we know of the variants going around. what happens is, if you have a community that sticks together, and agrees to shun vaccines, and where everyone gets together a lot, well, they're kind of doomed. the covid will get them.

and that's what's new from the mountain - nothing much. but i'll let you know the minute i hear anything.