Last night I woke to pouring rain at about 2:50am. As I listened to it fall heavily on the grass I thought "Wow, it's raining really hard" so to showboat a little it increased it's efforts and rained even harder. In Calgary it doesn't really rain like that. The only time it did was a few years ago when everything flooded and most of the province was in a state of emergency. It was the year Fish Creek Park suffered devastating damage and the entire community of Okotoks was facing a disaster - it truly was the worst flooding I can remember in 30 odd(29) years in Calgary.
That's because water there doesn't drain since the land and rivers are not designed to handle that kind of volume. Here, it rains and rains and and rains for days and the water just ... disappears. I keep expecting to wake up to ditches full, garden washed out and my house floating in the middle of the harbour. Even digging in my lawn yesterday (to remove the top layer of sod to put in a veggie garden) the dirt was wet but loose even though it had absolutely poured for the previous 12 hours and there was still a heavy sprinkle.
The soil here is red or brown and kind of loamy and soft. It is hard packed the deeper you go but the top layer is relatively loose and easy to shift - even when wet. It's a little heavier when wet of course but not harder to work with - it's ideal gardening soil which becomes obvious when you see how things here grow. Just try and stop things from growing.
To me dirt has always been shades on the gray scale. In Alberta it varied from region to region in quality and color - the slate colored hard packed clay north of Cochrane grew hardly enough grass to keep a horse alive on 5 acres whereas the black soil of Crossfield grew enough thick green grass to founder a horse in a couple days. Here, dirt is shades of red and brown and has been strangely hard to get used to seeing. Maybe it's because when smeared on your shoe, or pants, or hands, to a Prairie bred girl, it looks like dog pooh.
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