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When we “retired,” I just wanted to live in the country and spend all of my time in the garden. How relaxing and peaceful that sounded.
In retrospect, what WAS I thinking? Since moving to the Texas Hill Country fourteen years ago, I have endured the hottest August in recorded history when temperatures hit 113 degrees. I’ve dealt with grasshoppers of Biblical proportions. And I remember the invasion of the canker worms in 2005 when webs decorated the entire neighborhood making it look like the set of a scary Halloween movie. I’ve encountered armadillos, possums, skunks, deer, fire ants, and a porcupine.
We’ve witnessed not one but two one-hundred year floods and watched houses float away down the Guadalupe River. And all of us have patiently waited out the worst droughts in several decades. I haven’t even mentioned the wind and hail storms or the ice storm that hit in 2007 turning the whole area into a hard hat zone and beautiful live oaks into stacks of firewood.
I have done my best to amend what little soil exists between the gazillion rocks, some of which are the size of small foreign cars. I’ve planted mostly Texas natives as those seem to be the only things that will survive this hardscrabble landscape. Miraculously, many of them actually thrive!
After reading Elmer Kelton’s book The Time It Never Rained or seeing photos of Medina Lake, I feel guilty for whining. That’s why I love photos so much. They serve as a reminder of better times. They’re evidence that the gardens were once green and I know that, if we’re patient, the good times will come again. Mother Nature will provide another glorious year like 2011 when the wildflowers were thick. Folks will flock to our area from all over the state drawn by magazine articles extolling the wonders of the Texas Hill Country. And some of them will move here thinking these beautiful flowers are a constant blessing. Little do they know that those bluebonnets are simply God’s way of rewarding us for all of the hardships we sometimes endure the rest of the year.
Yes, the critters are numerous and this land can be tough. But we gardeners are tougher, and I love it here.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to pray for rain.
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**ARCHIVED POST AUTHOR: trussel
