Weather news has a short shelf life, but as we’re still in the week that began with the big wet, perhaps I can sneak in a few retrospective observations.

Sitting snugly up here on Buderim, I almost felt guilty about all that beautiful water rushing off the plateau, not replenishing precious storages, but causing at best inconvenience and at worst messy damage for lowlanders.

Surely some of the water that runs off Buderim roofs, yards and streets in such downpours could be piped by gravity to collection points at the foot of the mountain and used, whether or not for potable purposes.

Impracticable? Idealistic? Too hard? Maybe, but all these epithets have been applied to lots of ideas that have eventually made a difference.

And remember the “Small is Beautiful” campaign of late last century?

A bit before its time, perhaps, but when I think of all the monstrous works being undertaken (and boasted about) to facilitate the use of cars at a time when we’re being urged to cut back their use, I wouldn’t mind seeing that approach revived.

Now for a wet weather story with a happy ending.

Some months ago, I mislaid … well, alright, lost … a hearing aid. You know, one of those little bone-coloured things.

Having hunted for it fruitlessly for weeks, I had to accept the consequences of my carelessness … replacement at a cost that made me blanch.

What made this experience even more galling, and had my friends and relatives shaking their heads, was that it was a repeat performance.

In the previous year, this little item’s predecessor went missing, and it was only after I had replaced it, also at daunting expense, that it turned up in my neighbour’s garden, of all places.

How it got there is a mystery, although a couple of canine visitors are still, to adapt police-speak, “persons of interest.” It does look like a bone, remember.

Fast forward to last weekend, when what looked like being a dreary Saturday turned into one of celebration, thanks to a 10-year-old visitor, Evangeline, whose dark eyes remind me of the heroine of the same name in that long poem by Longfellow … “How softly they gleamed.”

With her soccer match called off due to the rain, and patiently waiting to do more exciting things while her father Nanu Grewal and I talked writing and stuff, Evangeline was exploring the deepest recesses of my lounge when she happened on my long-lost hearing aid.

Again, the circumstances of its disappearance remain a mystery, but who cares?

Thank you, Evangeline.

And Another Thing
Talking of mysteries, Mapleton’s Ted McCosker, whose experience of dried-up springs starting to run before heavy rain has intrigued AAT for a couple of years now, reports that a friend at Curramore, which like Ted’s property is in a rain shadow, told him a week or so ago that her springs had started up again.

And sure enough, as with Ted’s experience and that of an old neighbour who told him many years ago about the same phenomenon in India, down came the rain a few days later.

Clearly, Nature still has a few tricks up her sleeves.

rich.29@bigpond.net.au
journoremembers.blogspot.com