We’ve had rain here the last few days (half an inch in the gauge at my house, much more elsewhere, much less other elsewhere). To wet climate denizens, that might seem like no big deal, but such is our drought that some residents of our community have literally never seen rain before. Coco explains:

You’ve been in a storm before? Well, my tomato and pepper plants never had been. It was their first rain ever! Come to think of it, it was the Boy Pup’s first big storm too. For here, and in these days, it was a real deluge.

Such was the novelty that for two nights in a row, everyone at my house stopped what they were doing and watched it rain. We went out on the porch, we stood in the front window, we angled the view to the north to see the lightning show, some of us (well, honestly, just one of us) stared at our little electronic weather gizmos like they were one of those overtime shootouts in the World Cup final. We even had to rescue a neighbor out for a walk and caught in said deluge.