I don’t know why everybody is complaining about the weather this month. The nice thing about the alternating rain, sunshine, wind gusts, flooding, sleet, occasionally balmy temperatures, thunder, snow and hail that we’ve been enjoying in Enumclaw this week, is that it hasn’t included an earthquake.

It’s also been an acceptable excuse to stay inside a warm house with your feet up watching TV or working crossword puzzles because it certainly doesn’t make sense to get stuff out to start cleaning the refrigerator or work on your overdue taxes when you’d have to stop when the deluge lets up so you can rush back outside to finish planting the vegetable and flower seeds or digging up the dandelions. Right?

Trying to sneak in a head start on spring gardening, daughter Susy, granddaughter Josie an I were happily sowing seeds like amphetamine-crazed beavers last week, when . . .

The Seattle Times was practically forced into featuring the weather this week. It reported that while folks in more normal habitats than Western Washington are accustomed to having four seasons, we have to get real. Our local meteorologist suggests that we have only two seasons: Wet and Dry.

“. . . residents of the Puget Sound region just can’t seem to agree. Some claim that rather than using seasons or months, it would be more accurate to use something like: Rainy, Extra Dark and Rainy, Fake Spring, Disappointment, Juneuary, Glorious Sun, Oppressive Sun, Four Glorious Weeks, and then Wet again.”

“In recent years, unfortunately, the period previously known as Four Glorious Weeks — usually sometime between late August and early October when the skies are blue, the temperatures are warm (but not too hot) and the mountain and marine views dazzle — has been replaced by Smoke and Ash.”

Even if the climate gets a bit smokey though, the Four Glorious Weeks – for instance, the last couple weeks of August and first two of September – are still the best time to visit us, or to have a wedding, a yard sale, a public flogging, or a forest fire.

Our fearless efforts to plant the rest of our Dollar Tree flower and vegetable seeds has been temporarily scuttled by Mother Nature. Our visions of the carrots and pansies and beans we’ll be harvesting has been dampened – you might say – by the mildew and mold we hope we’re not cultivating instead.

I rely on our Chief Resident Gardener Susy to let us know when it’s time to venture back out to our pots and plots, sprouts, seeds, weeds, and fantasies about the Garden of Eden we’re going to produce if only we don’t drown first.

Susy, on the other hand, relies on the seven donkeys who live with us. If they won’t even step outside the barn that day, she considers that as an offer you can’t refuse. Desist with the hoes and trowels, guys, it’s time to get down and dirty with the vacuum cleaner, babysitting her grandson Wesley, cleaning out the horse stalls, or re-painting the kitchen.

I, instead, feel it’s time for feet up, popcorn bowl, and getting acquainted with this year’s Oscar winning movie duds. Or, if all else fails, and guilt wins, grappling with the refrigerator’s inedible noxious fungi. In other words, there may be friendlier activities than the sweat, sunburn, aches and pains, mosquito bites, bee stings and slug slime of gardening in the Pacific Northwest. I like to think it may be Mother Nature’s way of giving gardeners an excuse to get some rest.

I know we’ll be back at it soon, though, because gardeners tend to be well-fertilized with hope for tomorrow, and for more temperate barometric readings. After all, when God planted the Garden of Eden, I bet it wasn’t raining.