Don't you love crazy contradictions? Oklahoma is a state full of them. We swing wildly from flooding rains to searing drought, as this summer has shown.

When it rained a few days ago, I was so excited. We had been without significant rainfall for so long. Sure enough, everything really greened up and it looks so much better. A few wildflowers (notably liatris, goldenrod, and the wild blue sage) started blooming, especially in areas that never had been mowed all year. Even in mowed pastures, though, small signs of blooming life returned. This is really important because the monarchs need to have flowers in bloom as they migrate. Down here in southern OK, we usually see the migration in the first week of October.

On the other hand, green grass is deceptive. It can make you think that grass fires and wildfires are less likely to be a problem. That isn't necessarily true. While the grass greened up, it still is a very dry green. A couple of days ago we had 8 fire departments paged out in rapid succession for a series of grassfires along I-35. I'd bet all the fires were started by a vehicle that was dragging a chain sending off sparks or perhaps by a semi tractor-trailer type truck with a tire that was coming apart and throwing off pieces of burning rubber. Thanks to a remarkably fast and aggressive response from those firefighters, all the fires were extinguished before they could merge together and become a big grassfire or wildfire (I don't know if we had enough wind for them to really run wild, but they were giving it their best shot). Ironically, because the grass had greened up it put out a lot more smoke than dry grass does as it burned and that made the fires look even worse than they were. So, while we are exceedingly grateful for the rain, the greener grass and the blooming flowers, we're still dangerously dry and the fires haven't stopped.

The cracks in the ground at our place haven't closed up much, and I'm still watering the soil around the foundation every few days to keep the cracking ground as far away from the house as possible. That's Standard Operating Procedure when you have dense, compacted clay that expands/contracts in the presence/absence of moisture. While the grass looks greener, the soil doesn't seem like it has improved much at all though it surely must have absorbed some of the rain that fell.

The trees that were dropping leaves and nuts because of the drought still are dropping leaves and nuts. The brown leaves especially bother me because once the ground is covered in them, it is a lot easier for copperheads to blend in...and then get stepped on by an unsuspecting human. I've never had to rake up leaves in August and September like I've had to this year, but leaving this makes the snake risk increase.

We need more rain, and I'm not sure when we'll get it. Yesterday our relative humidity dropped to 22% by mid-afternoon. In a way, that is nice because it can give you a heat index lower than your actual temperatures. Another bonus is that dry air can cool off more easily at night, so we dropped to 60 degrees early this morning at our mesonet station, and to 63 degrees at our house. It kinda felt like fall for a little while this morning. The downside is that with low RH values, fires start more easily and I've noticed that when RH is that low, my skin feels like it is cracking when I'm outdoors.

Is anyone else seeing any improvement in lawns and gardens since it rained? I know some of you had a whole lot more rain than we did and I'm picturing your part of the state looking like a green, green Garden of Eden.