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It’s time to face some facts along the La Crosse River Trail. Although I think of myself as a genuine rural resident, I have now lived a bit more than half of my life — 40 years, in fact — as a villager, which is somewhat more restrictive than the life to which I was born.

Yet, I still see the things that the folks who live by tilling the soil are doing. Every new season offers me a challenge that results in memories of similar seasons past. Memories that must be used to measure what we currently have against what we’ve known long ago. The only difference for me is that today I notice the wild community more than the cultivated one.

Over the past decade, I have repeatedly told you who read these words about a shortage of moisture in our area. Especially, I have told you about something I called “my frog pond” at the west end of a marsh just east of Rockland. During the past 10 years, the pond has not existed long enough in any one of them for even one generation of frogs to grow up in it. Tall, weedy, reed canary grass has overgrown the pond’s dry bottom to the detriment of everything else, until early this spring when we finally got enough water from snow melt and rain; we have now been overcompensated.

Within those 10 years during which the pond has been dry, there has never been enough moisture to support many of the wild plant species that had grown and bloomed here as a part of the prairie community. Remember that this community is around 10,000 years old, based on the best estimate of the folks who spend their lives studying such things. The plant species that have lived out there for that long must have faced every extreme weather condition: heat, drought, flood, cold, snow and ice. And they were losing ground in the face of a 10-year drought.

Now it appears that the accumulated moisture of the last year and a half is bringing them back. Even so, I was told, just a few days ago, that the soil moisture in our sandy soil is still below normal.

On the good side of things, I have done some walking over the prairie segment of our trail just lately, and I found some signs of improvement in the status of the plant life our there.

The first positive sign that I found was the presence of several plants of the prairie violet in a few spots where I had never seen it before. That means that dormant seeds have been germinating just recently, probably as the result of recent rains.

Pasque flowers are increasing. Delphiniums, spiderworts, hoary puccoons and harebells are reappearing in their old haunts. Spiderworts, especially, are doing well.

Many more phloxes than I’ve seen in years were in bloom in one area. But, best of all, hairy puccoon, one of our showiest plants, is putting on an especially good show this year. Big patches of bright yellow that I think are the finest I’ve ever seen anywhere.

At least some of the results are outshining the expectations along the trail.