The other day I woke to the dripping and drumming of rain on the alder canopy at the back of our farm. I got up and opened the back door to let the cat in out of the pitch black morning. I stepped out into the rain and turned my sleepy face upward to catch a few drops, but no drops hit my face. It wasn’t raining. It was only a dense fog coating the alders and falling as it gathered on the drought stressed leaves. This is about all the moisture our garden has received in the past few months. Except the few times I decided to wrestle the turgid hose around the yard and christen a few of the newly planted hydrangeas, conifers and perennials with well water.

I have been thinking about water a lot this year. Planning a post, taking notes. Since January I’ve filled 50 pages or more in my notebook with thoughts and observations about water. I’ve taken innumerable pictures of all the watery places I visited. Yet water, from the rain drop, which we dodge, to the Pacific Ocean, which we barely comprehend, I find hard to write about. I was thinking if I could just contain it in a few words, like a water feature in a garden: little falls, little pools and a recirculating pump. But I loath water features. Too much hamster on a wheel for me. But the wild gurgling, puddling, splashing and roaring of water, the soaking and seeping, lapping and bubbling of water, the dribbles and drizzles and drownings that I want to write about become mute in me, though they say I am 60% water, that 3 days without water can lead to my death, so important and powerful is water.

I live in a flood plain and I know the power of water. If I were a pagan I’d worship it. Maybe I should. I know most of my travels involve watery places. Last weekend Michael and I hiked a portion of the Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park. The trail follows Steven’s Creek through Steven’s Canyon. You never get so far from the creek so that you can’t hear it speaking to you. And when you get close to where it has been eroding the rock of the canyon for eons the rush of water is symphonic and deafening. And also cleansing: all the worry of the week washes down stream in this tunnel of pummeling sound. Like a good massage it drags you out of yourself ,yet leaves you deeper within.

I am not finished with water. How can I be? The rainy season is looming just ahead. I’ve only skimmed the surface with this post.

The canyon is chiseled and polished by the force of the creek.

Those are not toothpicks, but 40 foot trees piled up  by the creek at a narrowing in the canyon.

When I was a lad my cousin Mark and I would sit in the back seat of his parents car parked in their driveway. We would make believe we were fat cats  and smoke giant cigars we made by rolling up  magazines, probably the Weekly Readers we were suppose to be reading. I don’t think we imagined ourselves oil barons or Wall Street tycoons, what we did didn’t matter. It was all about smoking our big fat cigars and tell our imaginary chauffeur—who we unimaginatively called Jeeves— to take us to the airport; it was the 60s and we were jet-setters.

Well, my cousin Mark never became a smoker, but I did. I only smoked a cigar once or twice and it made me horribly sick; I liked to inhale. I liked cigarettes. I quit quite a few years ago, though the cravings have never vanished. I have taken up growing tobacco, not just the ornamental nicotianas, but smoking tobacco: Oneida, Louisiana Pirogue and Hopi. Michael won’t let me grow it in the green house with the tomatoes  because it is a vector for tomato-tobacco mosaic virus .He doesn’t want me to start smoking again, either. But still it try for cryptic homeopathic reasons I grow tobacco.

Now the Snoqualmie Valley is not the best place to grow tobacco. Not enough heat. So last year when my tobacco got a foot tall I got pretty excited.  I cured it under our deck, where it is as shady and drafty as a tobacco shed, put a few crumbs in a pipe and smoked it. It was tobacco, all right, with all bite, cough and buzz of anything I’ve ever bought. And the dangerously addictive message: “smoke more”. I didn’t. Tobacco with all its stinky pleasures and toxic warnings is behind me now.

Still I have a cigar. It’s a 42 year old cigar in a cellophane wrapper with the pink words “It’s a Girl” printed on it. I was 12 when my step-father handed me that celebratory cigar, my youngest sister had just been born. I can’t imagine anyone acting like a fat cat and giving out cigars at the birth of a child anymore, seems quaintly uninformed in these health vigilant times. Remember when the cigarettes were behind the cashier at the local grocery store?

Last week I was in the grocery store when the September/October issue of Fine Gardening magazine hit the news stands. I bought a stack. As I checked out the clerk asked, ‘ Why are you buying so many of the same magazine?”

“That garden on the cover, I designed it, and I’m going to hand these out to all my friends,” I said, new-father-proud.

I hope they don’t smoke them.