Our new tree is drowning.

It rained. Again.

It has been the wettest spring on record in our state, 17.48 inches of rain as of Thursday.  It was also the wettest May on record, with an average of 8.66 inches of rain.

Today I wanted to go to Iowa City, my hometown, but they’re sandbagging again.  It is sad.  They haven’t recovered from the Flood of 2008, when the art museum and Hancher Auditorium were destroyed.  Now the water is rising again.

We have been lucky so far here.  Rain in the basement.

This poor tree.  I bicycled to a nursery and chose it.  I walked among the acres of trees.  Did I want an autumn blaze maple, a pear tree, a linden, or an aspen tree?

I decided I wanted at least one tree that blooms.

At our first house as adults, we had pin oaks and pine trees.  After a storm, an artist asked our permission to take  a big oak branch home.  We were flattered.

We live now in a neighborhood of maples, lindens, sycamores, oaks, apple, pear, evergreens.

Last year our maple was destroyed by a storm:  we had to cut it down so it wouldn’t fall on our neighbor’s house.

You cannot imagine how horrible it is to go out in the back yard on a sunny hot day with no trees:  well, there’s still one tree in the WAY BACK, as we call it.

All you can do is straighten your back and go buy a tree.

It is strangely exciting to buy trees. Expensive, though. My husband has said I need to stop blogging and write some articles. All right, send me to Afghanistan or Iowa City.  Give me a notebook and I’ll find a story.

Or maybe I can write about the nursery.  Forty-five acres, yes, of trees.  Interviews, interviews.

Thee nursery landscaping team came and planted our new trees .  I looked out the window and there they were.  I practically missed the planting because they were so fast.  They jumped on the rootballs, I swear.

We know exactly how much water they’re supposed to get each week.

And now this.  It looks green and beautiful, but the leaves are drooping.  Too much water.

I have tried sitting next to the tree to encourage it.  Yes, that’s my Adirondack chair.  I sit back there and read Anna Karenina.  I jump up and touch the leaves a lot.

On the other hand, the hostas are loving the rain.  But didn’t we used to have more hostas?

My 99-cent flowers are pretty much deluged.  I’ll have to plant more.

VACATION DAY ONE.

What am I doing blogging when I’m on vacation?

Well, it’s like this.  One year we were going to an island and there was a hurricane warning.  We ended up instead in Bloomington, Indiana.

So we might as well skip the island and go to Iowa City.  Great bookstores, a pedestrian downtown, and an excellent university library.

I would love to do some research in the archives at the university library.  Whatever happened to the underground papers of the 70s, The Oppressed Citizen and Ain’t I a Woman?, the paper that was eventually taken over by the lesbian feminists?

But what I NEED in Iowa City is a copy of The Magic Mountain.  I looked for it at our B&N.  Uh-unh.  No Thomas Mann at all.

B&N has new books.  But if you want to buy Saul Bellow, there is no Saul Bellow.  If you want to buy Katherine Mansfield, there is no Katherine Mansfield.  They have a very poor backlist, which has recently gotten worse.

And there are strange errors.  You will find Lucan’s Civil Wars, an epic poem, in the ancient history section.  I could have told the know-all boss that it was in the wrong section, but she would probably have poisoned my coffee.   She follows customers around with her x-ray vision, hoping she can catch someone committing a crime.

B&N’s crime against me:  the bookseller’s pick this week is Dan Brown’s Inferno.