Monsoon Season in North Texas

It’s monsoon season in North Texas. We’re halfway though the year, yet we’ve reached our annual average of rain. A huge low-pressure system hovers to our west and is slow to amble away. This hungry beast pulls up air laden with water from the Gulf of Mexico. The result is rain, rain, rain. On the weather radar, vast clouds spin slowly around the low in the middle, rotating like a diffuse inland slow-motion hurricane.

Lakes that dwindled to mud-puddle status now overflow their banks. Wet-weather “sudden” creeks surge 24/7. It’s nice to be out of drought for the first time in two years. It would be even nicer to see the Sun again. Or maybe not. When sunshine does break through, the fungus blooms. Your sinuses fill with spores and swell up like a watermelon inside your skull. Mushrooms sprout out of your ears.

But enough is enough. Rain no longer soaks into our black clay gumbo soil. It just rolls off the surface and on to creeks and rivers until reaching the Gulf of Mexico. There the spinning low pressure system picks up the gulf moisture and promptly brings it back to us. A seamless hydrologic cycle in which are soggily immersed.

In the endless rain, roiling creeks and rivulets appear where none were before, trumping the artificial grid of gutters and gullies. Water goes where it flows, in ancient paths never forgotten, each drop following its own call of the Continental Divide, making contact with the ground and then flowing one direction or another, toward the ocean of its intent.

July 3, 2007