Church Of The Falling Rain

Jack Deatherage

Well, it's days like these
Make you fall down to your knees
Beauty sometimes takes your breath away
…
In the church of the falling rain
The keepers of the flame
Kneel at the altar of the rising sun
-The Stone Coyotes
 

(5/2021) Having overflowed a 150-gallon tank with one inch of rainfall we dropped a pond liner in the second cracked tank and filled that with a day's drizzle. I wanted two more tanks, but the DW settled on one. So, we've 450 gallons of water waiting for the summer's drought and the town's eventual ban on outside water use. I might buy a smaller tank (100 -gallons) for storing some of the water I capture in -house, but don't have room to store. (Captured water is shower water, fish aquarium water siphoned off during rare water changes and various "kitchen" waters that would normally go down the drain.)

Water tanks full, I turn my attention to filling plastic and cloth buckets with potting soil and various seed potatoes, flowering bulbs, rhizomes and corms. Doing the potting up in what used to be the dog room I was constantly opening the outside door so the aged kick mutt could go bark at the neighbor kidlets and their dogs. Pausing the potting to ease my back, I pondered the mouthy little beast and noticed mosquitoes doing "touch and goes" on the surface of the water tanks. Great! Now I need some fish to eat the skeeter larvae. With ice having skimmed the tank surfaces just the week before, I knew goldfish would be the only fins likely to survive this early in the season.

I prefer mollies or sword -tails for summer skeeter control, though a Siamese fighting fish in each tank does a great job of gobbling the wigglers. (A diet of larvae brings the Siamese up to not only their best colors, but also prepares them for breeding if one is into that.) But, goldies it be until warmer weather.

Now where do I find aquarium fish? There used to be a shop in Thurmont - long gone. Fairfield had one - also gone. Gettysburg once had one that specialized in goldfish, but - yes, gone. There were four shops in Frederick - the three I patronized have been closed for at least a decade. The one remaining shop inspired me to drive to Hagerstown, Randallstown and Lancaster to seek what I needed aquarium wise. Come to think on it, there were a couple of shops on the way to Hagerstown that have closed. Even Walmart in Gettysburg stopped selling fish!

Randallstown and Lancaster are just too far away when all I need are some feeder goldfish. That pretty much leaves Hanover, which has one shop that sells fish (a chain pet store) out of the several mom & pop shops I used to do business with over that way.

Fifty -two mile round trip for a dozen comet goldfish at $0.20 each. Man, the days when we would spend at least a hundred dollars on fish alone, during one visit to a shop, seems a lifetime ago. On the other hand - I've spent well over $500 on pond liners, stock tank, corrugated pipe, battery powered tree trimmer (the DW wanted it because it's cute), weed trimmer string modules, bags of potting soil, plastic and cloth buckets, wooden stakes, fertilizers, seeds, bulbs, corms and rhizomes just this spring.

I keep telling the DW that I'm done spending money on this project. Why she believes me is a puzzlement. Though she is aware I'm no longer spending money on vodka, bourbon, rum and gin so maybe she's just humoring me? Whatever.

It's time to build our altar to the rising sun, though the sun doesn't hit the garden until well after sunrise and we ain't kneeling at it with our knees the way they are. Those details aside - the laughing gods aren't particular about precision as much as they are demanding of amusement (I amuse them no end) - the altar is a dog kennel built to contain a wolf. The chain link enclosure is being repurposed as the center of the container garden we're building in the dog run. The rest of the yard's flowerbeds will have to wait another year for us to do more than weed whack them, though I might toss a few handfuls of fertilizer in them. They haven't been fed in a score of years.

The plan for the altar (hear the gods laughing?) is to lay down a paper weed barrier, assemble the kennel on that, line the perimeter with grow buckets and the interior with straw and hay bales. (Middle Brother is trialing hay bales in Mississippi this year and is having greater success than I've had with straw!) I want to lay rods across the top of the kennel and train various vines onto them to create a shaded spot for the DW to place a chair so's to meditate on how she ended up stuck with me.

Not being completely unaware that altars are what I make them of, I'll be trialing flowers in buckets in front of the house again. They'll be catching the first kiss of the rising sun so I'm technically following the song, though I sure as hell ain't kneeling on the concrete walk! At least not by my own choice. (Falling down and having to kneel to regain my feet does not count as kneeling at any altar! While the gods may laugh, they don't require physical suffering to amuse them.)

I'm thinking a coupla cloth buckets of Titan sunflower. Boxes of gladiolus cormlets that won't flower, but will grow to be larger corms for future flower gardens. Buckets of marigolds, zinnias and snapdragons. The DW wants to trial a few buckets of tomatoes and I might as well add a few with peppers. Our wants might be too much for that space so I'm also planning to trial some of the buckets along the walk beside the house.

The buckets surrounding the kennel will mostly contain heirloom varieties of tomatoes - 'German Pink', 'German Johnson' and 'Striped Roman'. Beans - 'Christmas' pole limas and 'Rio Zape' - a dry pole bean. Peppers - 'Ajvarski' (sweet) and 'Kalugeritsa' (hot) from Macedonia, and 'Txorixero' (sweet) from the Basque region of Spain. I might toss in some of the more familiar varieties as I won't be saving seeds this year. I've also seeds of 'Orangeglo' watermelon I want to train to fruit on top of the straw bales and a Soviet Union melon called 'Rich Sweetness 132' I'll train up the kennel panels because its fruit is tennis ball in size with perfume melon fragrance and honeydew flavor. I think the neighbor kidlets might enjoy both melons.

I bought Ipomoea lobata - 'Spanish flag' or 'Firecracker vine' I'd planned to grow up the front of the house to shade the brick a bit. However, the North Seton Ave Green Street Concept Plan derailed that idea while turning me to more fruitful adventures. Odd ain't it, how an unfunded state mandate can refocus my efforts to make the gods laugh.