The Nature of Water

LifeScapes 9, June 2024

BirdNote © Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
Mary Oliver

My mother called this bird (a yellow-billed cuckoo) a rain crow. His call—Ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, kow, kow, kow, kowlp, kowlp!—was probably the first bird call I learned to recognize. And then I’d wait for the rain. Mostly it came. When it didn’t, my always-optimistic mother would smile and say, “Don’t worry, Susan. It’s raining somewhere else.”

I heard our summer cuckoo early last week, and this time he was right. Tropical Storm Alberto sloshed through here that evening, leaving me grateful for his puddles: eight-tenths of an inch. Not nearly enough, for Alberto had already rained—with unfortunate enthusiasm—somewhere else.

It almost never rains “enough” here, on the 98th meridian. The past few years, it’s been raining even less. The county’s annual average for 1971-2000 was 38.5 inches. Here at MeadowKnoll fifteen years ago, we were avera…