TUSCUMBIA-Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m part of an I Love Lucy rerun. I can’t decide if it’s the Lucy the wall paper hanger, or Lucy the Candy Maker, Lucy trying to get to Europe inside a steamer trunk, or Lucy grape stomper at the vineyards in Italy. I’ll be humming ‘Fly in the Buttermilk, shoo fly shoo’ now for a week.
My mowing schedule is not on schedule with all the rain we’ve had the past week 
or so. I pulled the bagger off of the mower and started mowing the yard Saturday and realized that I was almost out of gas, so I put the mower up and planned to use the tractor and mow the lower forty. As I took my ear protection headset off, I heard thunder and decide to wait and see and worked on the flower beds near the house in case I needed to make a mad dash for the house. After about an hour the storms hit elsewhere and I mowed with the tractor for an hour until it started raining.
The next day I took Mom out to eat and to get our groceries, the Hooligans groceries and then picked up some gas on the way home. After I opened the garage and pulled in, my energizer bunny Blackie crawled under the back of the truck and let out a big sigh. If it was too hot for her, I didn’t need to be out in that humidity working either and decided to wait a little bit before gassing up the mower.
A gentle rain started as I hauled the bag of food to the barn. There’s nothing the Hooligans like better than a fresh bag of food. What ever happened to the fifty pound bags? Now we are down to 37 and a half and the price goes up with each decrease in size.
After feeding and putting the rest in the wall bins, I sat on my mower and just listening to the rain hitting the trees. 
Have you ever just sat and listened to the rhythm of a gentle rain? The doves were singing their mournful song, a mockingbird was imitating a blue jay, and the quail calling bob, bob white, bob, bob white. The hum of the ruby-throated hummingbirds could be heard as they jostled for who was in control of the feeder. My camera was in my truck, so I just sat back and enjoyed the show. One adult male sat on top of the hanger and was challenging and chasing each bird who dared to try and partake of the clear sugar water.
Us country folks tend to take these things for granted. I first realized what city folks were missing out of when some high school friends dropped in last year to see my flowers. All of a sudden Richard stopped and a big grin spread across his face as he said “listen, I haven’t heard the sound of a Bob White since I was a kid.”
When the rain slacked off some, I made my way to the house and sat on the tailgate of 
my truck watching the rain drops bouncing off of the driveway wishing it would stop so I could do some weeding of the beds along the driveway. That job washed out, I sat up a potting bench on the tailgate and repotted some of my African violets. As a steady rain continued falling, a Carolina wren was flittering along the 
pergola with a worm in her mouth, looking distressed at me. She would fly from a lawn chair to the pergola at the far end and hop up toward the garage door, look at me, fly back to the lawn chair and start the circle again. I finally realized that she needed to get to a hanging basket nearby. Finally after much stress, her Motherly duties won out and she hopped into the basket and stuck her head into her nest.
Despite the weather her job of hunting for food and feeding her young doesn’t end. Her young ones were still hungry and needed to be fed. A Mother’s job is never done.
