A different rain-lily

Rain, rain, rarely here,
Come again another year.*

Until this past weekend, for month after month we in central Texas had had only a few showers of very limited range and duration, sometimes lasting only a few minutes and not even covering a whole neighborhood. I think one of those micro-showers must have come to my part of Austin at the end of September, because on October 1, when Eve and I went to Costco and began walking toward the store from the place where we’d parked, we noticed that a few rain-lilies had sprung up beneath some trees on a little island in the parking lot. Not yet fully open, these were the smaller rain-lilies of autumn, Cooperia drummondii, rather than the taller and somewhat larger ones shown in the springtime of this blog in a first post and then a second post on June 29.

Not about to miss my chance on the first day of October, I let Eve go on into the store while I drove the two miles home, grabbed my camera bag, and returned to the little island in the parking lot to do what I so often do: lie on the ground and take pictures. Here’s one of the results.

It’s now several days past this weekend’s welcome rain, and suddenly instead of a few stray rain-lilies Austin is covered with thousands of them.

For those interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 2 and 4 in About My Techniques are relevant to today’s picture.

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* My friend H.J. Hewitt objected to this little ditty because it sounds as if I don’t want rain this year; that was the sense of the original nursery rhyme: “Rain, rain, go away, / Come again another day.” So, as we near the end of 2011, here’s a rain-lover’s rewrite:

Rain, rain, rarely here,
We hope for more this coming year.

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman

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