In a previous life, my father and I regularly visited my sister in Seattle, where she was also living a previous life.In what we like to call "the Pacific Southwest" of this country, as well as the northwestern U.S. states, the weather consists of cloudy skies with occasional precipitation and occasional peeks at the sun. People who live there try to tell me how beautiful the weather is, and I'm sure they're right if by "beautiful" they mean "hardly ever snows but hardly ever glows, either."
Weather forecasts there are interesting. My father enjoyed reading the "probs" (what my mother's father called the "probabilities," or weather forecast) in the paper and listing all the ways that the forecasters could say "cloudy with a chance of rain." "Variable cloudiness," "isolated showers," "mist," "fog," "occasional showers," "cloud mix," etc.
One of my father's favo(u)rites was "sunbreak." It means "The skies will be cloudy and rainy all day, but all you'll remember is the few moments during which the sun peeked out and that's why you say the weather here is beautiful."
For the past few weeks, our weather has been much like that of the Pacific Southwest. Sunshine is an event. We had some on Wednesday, and the photo shows our morning's entertainment.
We have two mama does, one with one fawn and one with two, hanging around in the area. We think the one-fawn mama gave birth in the back 40, but that might be wishful thinking.
We don't have a picture of our entertainment yesterday--in the middle of a gentle shower, the two-fawn mama and her wee ones played in the water, right in front of the house where we could see. It lightens the heart to see someone enjoying weather you're sick of.
I'm glad we have this picture, though. It's so nice to have documentation of sunny mornings and scenes straight from a Disney nature show, especially when it is--wait for it--misty, foggy, with chances of showers and thunderstorms in the probs.
