After a long stretch (for Vermont) of very warm, very dry weather, rain moved in on Sunday night.

Well, maybe “moved” isn’t quite the right verb. It was more like the rain came lookin’ for a fight because the wind accompanying it tore up trees along Route 14 in Sharon and uprooted two HUGE maples near Route 4 in Quechee.

But last night and today, we got the soaking we really needed. (Red flag warnings for fire danger are pretty rare around here but we’d been in one since late April.)

The green of our northern New England world grows more intense by the hour, and the riverside plants that we walk among just needed a good shot of H2O to take over their flood plain home.

At this time of year, my favorites are the ostrich ferns, the ones we eat as fiddleheads when they are barely out of the ground. They should be shoulder high today!