If it isn't obvious yet to you, I'm very much in love nowadays.
With the monsoon rainy weather, that is. The almost-daily drenching has turned my backyard into a microcosm of my dream rainforest.
These days, I'm not really in the mood for poetic or deeply thoughtful writing. Why, you ask? Because I have to tackle a f*ing combination of weekly and monthly work deadlines again soon. Grrr.
But I'd like to share with you the effects of magical rain... the monsoon riot that has run rampant in my backyard since two months ago. So I'll just let these two pictures speak for themselves.
First pic (below) is an amateurish shot using an amateurish camera (yeah, yeah, I know about depths of field, blah blah :-). It shows that my guava trees have gone beyond the threshold of blooming flowerhood, into the next phase of budding fruithood.
The guava fruits shown here are still small (around 1" in diameter), hard as semi-dry clay, and bitter as green plum. But in 2-3 months time, they will mature into fist-sized, golden yellow, juicy, mouth-watering sweet guavas. Each tree will probably yield 50, 80, up to a hundred fruits -- assuming that this area doesn't suffer a direct hit from powerful typhoons until then.
Next, the pic below nicely shows biodiversity in microcosm: moss, fern, and other moisture-loving plants that grow on the retaining stone wall back of the house, which protects the yard from run-off water that often sloshes out of drainage ditches that criss-cross the slopes around these parts.
I've always wanted to make rock gardens like these. Now I only need to take pictures of them, as they proliferate around the house with utter abandon.
Nowadays, I'm not particularly proud of my backyard which is overrun with weeds. From certain angles, it looks like the neglected churchyard of an abandoned mountain village caught in the middle of a shooting war. (At least that's how it looks to me, and I did see much of those sad rural scenes in my travels.)
But hey, it's the closest thing I have today to an authentic rainforest creeping back to reclaim the interstices of urban space. Complete with an overgrown monkey, disguised as a blogging addict taking pics with a crummy digital camera.
