THE LEMON MERCHANT

Friday after I posted about the tomato, I got the camera battery charged and did this brief video of the tomato through one of the back windows.The little bird had been in the shade of the pot for about twenty minutes.  I can't blame it for taking shelter from the heat of the sun.  At this point it had been around two weeks since we had seen any rain.  The River Birches that grow around our patio do better in a swampy wet environment.   Apparently they're used by landscaping crews because the bark is decorative or something.  They need water, and all the leaves fall off if they don't get it.  Our yard is not swampy, and due to the lack of rain and temperatures consistently in the upper 90s, just about all the grass has gone brown.  We set up the sprinkler last weekend to at least give them some water.  I'm not into watering grass, but I didn't want the trees to die on us, so the sprinkler was strategically placed to favor the bushes and trees around the patio, while not wasting any water on the crispy grass.  I did the same thing Friday morning while I was typing up that last blog post.  I was all set to write another blog post about how badly we need some rain, but later that evening the skies darkened.Some nasty storms rolled through the area, and did a lot of damage.  Now power is still out in many places around town, and it seems like just about everyone we know has trees down or some sort of damage to their homes.  The airport a few miles to the North of us recorded a wind gust of 81 mph.  We were fortunate.  No damage to our new home, no trees down, and we still have power.  News reports discussed how so many trees were felled due to the recent lack of rain.  They had all dried up and become brittle.  I felt kind of dumb watering trees, but now I wonder if maybe they're still standing because of that meager amount of water we provided them with.