Happy Monday! I hope all of you had a great weekend. This is a picture of how I started my weekend.

This is the little garden plot inside my Garden of Weedin’. Over the years it’s held tomato plants that grew nice and tall, and various kinds of squash that rambled their way out of the plot. The butternut squash especially loved this spot. Last year at this time I was rambling across Spain, so I didn’t plant anything and let nature take its course. (I told myself it was good for the soil.) And it did with grass, a bit of crown vetch, clover, and assorted other vines–though luckily only a sprig or two of trumpet vine and poison ivy–and of course my flora nemesis, Chinaberry sprouts.

This year I decided to reclaim it, so Friday afternoon I started pulling greenery and dislodging worms (I was happy to see those little wrigglers) and get it ready for a handful of tomato plants I’d already bought. Nothing like already having plants to motivate you to prepare the plot! In the picture you can make out part of my gardening bench. When I started, the wild growth reached well behind it. I’d cleaned out much of the Chinaberry so I could have space to get inside the plot and work.

At about this point, the rain came. It wasn’t a heavy downpour, just that steady soft kind of rain that reminded me of when I was a kid back in Ohio, asking Mom if I could go out and play in it (usually barefoot, sometimes with an umbrella), or as a young mom myself taking my kids out, or as a Nana taking the Grands out puddle-stomping in our rain boots. It was one of those lovely rains that didn’t drive you inside but invited you out … or to at least open your windows so you could listen to the drops and smell the freshness it brings, the petrichor. I love that word and glad to think there’s an actual word for the smell of rain.

It was the kind of rain that if you watched closely, you practically saw the grass grow just a smidge, but definitely saw leaves greening brighter. It wasn’t sunny enough for a rainbow– though it didn’t stop me from looking just to make sure–but I was grateful to be out in it. It wasn’t just because it made the weeding easier, (easier but messier as my bibs and gloves became wetter and muddier–a small price to pay), the rain lifted my heart. There were the memories it conjured, but mostly the senses that sharpened, especially the sense of hearing.

The rain sounded different hitting the roof of our old barn than it did hitting the roof of our house and the gutters and downspouts. Our house is surrounded by trees and with their different sizes, leaf structures, and density in various parts of the woods, the rain landed differently. All of it making a wonderful, syncopated rhythm that I was sitting in the midst of, like listening to a percussion section sitting in surround-sound. But the best sound was the birds’ singing.

As soon as the rain started, it was as if the birds woke up. The more it rained the louder they sang. I imagined they were as excited as I was to finally have rain. I pictured them lifting their heads, spreading their wings, and shaking off water droplets, just to stretch out and welcome the refreshing water again. I don’t have a bird call app on my phone but there had to have been a dozen or more different chirps, tweets, squawks, and twitters emanating from the trees and the ground. It sounded like they were having fun, like kids squealing playing in the rain. More than once, I stopped pulling weeds and just listened, my heart filling with a primal connection to nature, and I knew this moment of rain and birdsong would be this week’s blog post. Even now, two days later as I write this, the memory brings back that sensation. Over the weekend someone posted this on Facebook:

Listening to birds reduces cortisol, slows your heart rate, and triggers parasympathetic calm. Why? Because for 100,000+years, birdsong meant ‘you’re safe.’ Your body still remembers.

Is this true? I don’t know, but I’d like to think so.

It’s been a while since I purposely sat out in the rain, or rather on our deck under the eaves or on the front porch. This weekend was a reminder to do that more often … we just need to have the rain, which we’ll have the next few days.

This is a picture from Friday evening, and yesterday I planted my 11 tomato plants. I got them in the ground just in time for the rain to begin again.

I’ll be gone this weekend for a little road trip so I won’t be here on Monday. But I’ll be back at my window on Tuesday for an early Book Review Monday! Over the next couple of days I’ll be packing and repacking, but I’ll also make sure to spend some time out in the rain. I hope you have a good week–rain or shine.