I really don’t need to know how much it rains. I am not a farmer, gardener or dam gate keeper. So this matter of placing a rain gauge in the perfect spot and then checking it after each rain is borne of my background; my dad was a farmer.
It just seems like something I should carry on, like searching for agates and butternuts. And, since I’m now known to have a rain gauge which I check and empty faithfully, I get asked often, “How much we get?”
Earlier this spring after a fairly steady overnight rain, I held the glass gauge at eye level to read 2 inches. Exactly 2 inches. And then it hit me. I really do need to know simply because I really do want to know. And I want to know because no one else is going to give me the exact measurement of how much it rained in my yard, or even on my end of town.
But rain gauges are work beyond the checking and emptying. One must be a gauge of temperatures, too, for on spring nights and again in autumn when the mercury is dipping toward the freezing mark, the gauge must come indoors, lest a quick shower is followed by clearing skies and freezing temps.
I’ve been caught several times, usually in the fall. The water in the gauge freezes, the glass breaks, and there’s a trip to the store for a $1.88 new glass cylinder. The new cylinder is shiny and clean, and the numbers easy to read. However, it comes with a cheap tin holder to tack to the deck railing or post, or an equally cheap plastic wedge to shove in the ground, at which point the wedge promptly breaks.
I toss the holders away, for we have a heavy, bluish-green metal frog who is all too happy to hold the cylinder and be called Rainy Day Frog. Rainy Day stands upright 6 inches on his front legs so his front feet and mouth touch the ground when the rod, which is attached under his wide gaping mouth, is poked into the lawn.
The frog always makes me smile with its eyes bulging and its legs rising and bent to form a diamond shape. And Rainy Day appears to be smiling back at me, probably because he always knows before I do how much it rained.