As I write this, the sky is clouding over as it broods with some approaching rain. Belying the sunny morning we have enjoyed, the radar tells me there is a band of heavy rain stretching from Lightning Ridge down to the coast and into the sea in a south easterly direction. There is tonic in the air today.

Though our dams are full, soil moisture has been very low. Showers over the last few weeks have been great, and after visiting my parents in south NSW for 4 days over last weekend, we were amazed to see how the whole district had exploded into green, and how much the garden crops (and weeds!) had grown! Nothing makes things grow like spring rain. 

I've just got to share some wonderful thoughts from LH Bailey out of his "The Harvest of the Year to the TIller of the Soil" (1927). 

"In all nature there is nothing so rejuvenating and so freshening as rain. It seems to arouse the very essence of all things inanimate and to awaken the souls of things that have being. 

"There is life-giving vigor in it. So unlike is it to ground and rocks and grass and trees and animals and buildings, even to brooks and lakes, that it seems like a drift from another world or some other existence when the drops shuttle down between the leaves, strike on shingle and pane, burst on the rocks, and send up bubbling columns on the pools. 

"All things look up to the sky and rejoice when the rain is past and when the sun shines again between broken rapid clouds. The crops will drink it in. The animals will dry themselves and go far afield. I do not yet understand why there is such exuberance in mere wetness."

But exuberance there is! In my teens I was in Bourke when the first rain fell in 3 or 4 years. We were at a petrol station filling up, and the attendant ran into her little office and came back out with her bathers on, laughing and dancing! A toddler started screaming - his mum explained he had never seen rain before. Soon he was grinning and poking his tongue out to drink it in!

Thank God for the rain!