The old rain gauge

Before I get inundated with a request to see the old rain gauge with a bullet hole in it, I took it back to the 4x4 redwood post and hung it for one last time. As you can see, it’s crazed, has a chip out of its top and a hole put there by Hilary in her Annie Oakley days when no beverage can was safe from being multi-perforated by her and her gun-totin’ buddies. The neighbors would call—“What’s all that shooting?” they’d ask nervously, thinking the sheriff had finally found the pot growers at home up on the hillside. “It’s nothing,” I would say. “Just the rain gauge.”

It’s a neat gauge. Inside is a narrower tube that fills with the first inch of rain, calibrated in hundredths. When it’s full, it spills into the larger outer body. Its capacity, without the bullet hole, is eleven inches (280 mm). I paid an astonishing $40 for it back in the mid-1980s and haven’t found an exact replacement, at least not from Taylor, its original maker.