Sprouts

In keeping with the random stuff sprouting around here, Mike noticed this growing out on our front steps this morning:




It's a baby oak tree sprouting out of an acorn. Isn't that cool! OK. Maybe I get a little too excited about stuff like this, but nature never seizes to amaze me. From one little nut, you can get an entire tree! The randomness of it all coming together, on our front steps no less, is mind boggling. I'm sure there are all sorts of deep metaphors just waiting to be drawn from that. I'll leave that to the deep thinkers and poets out there. I'm just a girl.

I have to make a correction about what I said yesterday about Acton being a place devoid of things like rain and fungus. Our super cool neighbor, who we miss terribly, (Seriously, we had the best neighbors. I'll have to write an entire post about them sometime.) sent me an email describing all of the massive quantities of rain that they've had since we left. She says:

....just thought you'd want to know that we have had so MUCH rain that the weeds are knee high in some places already, the mud abundant, and everything in the surrounding Acton is greener than I've ever seen. Poppies are starting to bloom everywhere as well.

When we lived there, our well was running dry (that sounds like the beginning of a really bad country song - throw in a burning tractor and a one-legged dog and you've got a hit on your hands!), it took everything in our power to keep our trees from dying, and poppies were unheard of - even the yuccas had quit blooming. The only thing that seemed to grow was pesky mustard weed (which by the way I'm convinced is hardy enough to grow anywhere including Mars - NASA should look into this. That stuff is even edible. How do I know this? Well, I caught Mike with a mouthful on more than one occasion.) and this crazy succulent that grew on the roof of our porch. Other than that, it was all dirt. So, what happens? We leave Acton and the drought breaks. I'm not sure what this all means. Once again, I'm pretty sure that there are some deep messages hidden in this. I'm going to go look at the baby oak tree, have some more coffee (coffee always brings enlightenment), and see if I come to any conclusions.