Monsoon

 

A few dots of welcome green showed up on the Northwest weather map yesterday, the tail end of a Southwest monsoon plume. Any drop of rain is welcome, but it wasn't nearly enough to dampen the fires. 

Despite the rain showers, the air quality in central Washington got even worse, if that's possible. The vacation home people can just leave, but most of the permanent valley residents are stuck under that cloud of smoke. Sometimes it clears out by afternoon, so we'll see what happens today. We want to take some things over and check on the house.

The "Purple Air" website gives real-time air quality for any place on Earth. Like most technology, both a blessing and a curse. I check it obsessively for Twisp-- just another kind of doom scrolling.

We went to South Seattle Community College yesterday to get out of the house. The Arboretum and Chinese Garden are never crowded. I was last there on a  masked up, bundled up walk with my friend Nancy. It was late winter, chilly and sopping wet. My glasses kept fogging up. It seems like a lifetime ago.

They do irrigate the rose garden, but everything else in the Arboretum was parched. The garden looks a bit run down, I suppose because the horticulture students and volunteers haven't been on campus as much during Covid.

We've gone almost 50 days without precipitation in Seattle, closing in on the record 55 days set in 2017. 

 

Adjacent to the Arboretum, there's still a wild looking greenbelt full of blackberries. Hopefully they don't tear it out to expand the formal Chinese garden. It's a great bird and wildlife habitat. You can imagine how many apartment buildings the developers would cram on that prime real estate if they got their hands on it. 

I can't pass a ripe blackberry bush without sampling a few. How about you? The taste of a seedy, prickly, slightly dusty blackberry is evocative of every Northwest summer. When life in Seattle was slow, simple and sweeter.

A few pictures from the Arboretum, taken by John.