The recent storms that caused distruction and some deaths in our region did not hit our valley as violently as elsewhere (here). But for many days there was a lot of water - downpours from the sky, and big angry waves crashing on the coastline - and we keep finding signs of it.
In the woods, mushrooms are growing everywhere, the kind of eery big mushrooms that you don't need to be a passionate micologist to be able to spot.
In the garden, potatoes popped up here and there. Yes, the storm brought us potatoes! The rain pounded so hard on the ground that it unearthed the early June potatoes that, as late as November, I hadn't yet lifted (it also unearthed the garlic I'd just planted, but no harm there either, I just pushed it back under its earth blanket).
At the beach, the big waves brought this thing ashore. It's a ball made of two eroded bricks stuck together with concrete, rounded and smoothed by the sea. It's quite hefty, but came home with us nonetheless. I'm thinking of making it into a stay-put pen holder, perhaps with a pen chained to it, so that when I need to write something down I can be sure to find a pen. I don't know how things are in your homes, but around here pens have a mysterious and somewhat infuriating habit of going walkabout!
