As I sit down at the end of the day to look back over the hours of daylight that led up to now, I’m stiff, sore and head-achy.

I spent about 6 hours at the church this afternoon with a bit of a laundry list of things to do that had been on the to-do list.

Let’s jump in…

Day at Church

The main reason that I was down at church today was to get ready for a special event that will likely be tomorrow’s Reason for Gratitude (no spoilers! 😉 ).

I did some tidying up in the garden and checked in on the bees and all of that got interrupted by a flash storm.

It wasn’t entirely a surprise, because they’d been announcing it, but they’d also announced other storms in the past weeks and we hadn’t gotten a drip-drip-drop. So I wasn’t breaking my stride over it…

… until it hit!

It was such a torrential downpour that you can see a car at the gate – it had pulled over while waiting for the peak of it to pass. Not only was it a torrential rain… but it was accompanied by hail stones about the size of my little finger’s finger-nail. Not huge, but in some parts of our region, there was enough that it coated the ground and did significant damage to crops and vineyards (Ouch! another hit after the late frost earlier in the year).

For my part however… It’s what I’m grateful for today: rain.

The ground here is parched. So much so that the ground at the bottom of the church yard has cracks in it and even the elder-berry tree on the church property has dry brown leaves – and it seems to me they grow in any conditions!

… plus a safe return!

Not only am I glad for the rain, but I’m glad Dominic and his friend Lucas were back earlier than expected.

They’ve been away camping for a week and were due back only tonight, but they left early and completed their 11h drive late morning… arriving safe & sound just in time for lunch.

Grateful!