storm a-comin'

As I sit at my window, I am looking westward and I see a storm a-comin'. The rose bush leaves are swaying back and forth, skies are greying and birds are trilling tunes for rain.

I remember my Grandad Dice, on cool Spring mornings, going out from the farmhouse, past the gooseberry bushes, through the fenced yard for chickens and the lonely pony who boarded on their farm--into the garden to look at the black soil mounds and gaze at the sky. "I feel a storm a-comin'", he would say, rubbing his right hip which ached with the barometer dropping. He loved those storms because they brought rains for the fields and, as a farmer, without rain, life isn't worth much.

I have the same ache in my right hip which I tried to loosen up in my 8 a.m. swim today. We need the rain so badly that I hope it comes today and sends fragrance of the newly-yellowed flowers on creyosote into the air. No other smell compares than than of rain in the desert.