From the Edge of Darkness
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| Love Lies Bleeding; Deb Marshall photo |
It’s not supposed to be very warm and humid more than a week
after the beginning of October, but it was, today, and the sky was black, and
the world grey, and it rained, which we needed badly, but not enough, so I hope
for more tomorrow. Then the sun came out and everything got rather steamy – we
might have been in Florida, except not quite that steamy, and no crocodiles, that I could see. The roof of the
tent on the wart had filled with water – it sags a bit when it rains a lot, and
we need to do a controlled dump, otherwise, as today, there’s a muffled roar as
the water dumps itself, and moments later a very annoyed Catman emerges from
his chair under the tent,
shaking his paws and glistening all over with wet and hissy spit. I suppose it
could have been a wayward crocodile shifting weight in the pools in the tent
roof that caused the water to dump – that wouldn’t be less believable than much
of the daily news since January.
Just an hour or so later, it suddenly poured buckets with
the sun still out and shining brightly. We jumped up and raced to the windows
to look through the trees to the northeast and there it was: a low, very
brilliant, very wide-banded rainbow. It didn’t last long before fading, but it
was quite glorious while it was there.
I’m on vacation so you can expect we’ll have many days of
bad weather coming up. This is the vacation during which I usually put my
garden to bed for the winter, but as it’s currently full-on summer again, I’m
doubting how well that will go. I have no
doubts that I won’t be mulching or pulling root vegetables or digging up
gladiola corms or even collecting tomato cages in the rain; and I have limits
about how much heat I’m willing to work in, too, especially in October.
With this evening’s temperature a balmy 60 degrees at nearly
midnight, the windows wide open and crickets caroling and toads singing their
night-time arias, it could be the middle of summer. I’m dressed, again, in
shorts and a t-shirt, and stripped down to a tank top earlier today; and one of
the Barkie Boys is too warm and panting a bit in the next room. The world seems
a very odd place at the moment, with little we can rely on, and I mean that in
the larger national sense as much as in the local weather. With the
horrifyingly immature and ever-more-dangerous wing-nut we have playing out his travesty of a presidency in
the White House, it’s hard to know whether it will matter one whit whether I
get the garden cleaned out and mulched or the spring bulbs planted. The garden,
and I, may not be here next spring. As the Tall Dude said, if the two
dick-waving fools start shooting nuclear bombs at each other, let the first one
fall directly on my house: we won’t be able to live through the aftermath, and
if by some sad chance we do, we’ll wish we hadn’t.
If you’re a person of a certain age, as I am, you probably
remember the false promise of living through the bad days after a nuclear
attack in the bomb shelter our fathers built for us, mostly in our cellars.
Ours was equipped with fold-down platforms upon which we were going to have to
sleep, and a few cans of vegetables and soup did eventually get stored on
shelves there to slowly rust away. The test-weekend that Dad thought we should
plan, so we could try out what it would be like, never happened; I suspect he
realized that six people trying to live together without electricity in a really tiny space would lead
to six throttlings in just hours. Bathroom facilities and air locks turned out
to be a too-expensive engineering feat, so even in a nuclear emergency we were
going to have to hold our breaths and run upstairs to use the facilities; and
besides, the cellar flooded every spring, and so did the bomb shelter. It
wouldn’t have worked even if the science had been adequate; and I wonder how
many of those so-called shelters ended up as wine cellars, 50 years later? Dad
did grow mushrooms in ours one year in a cardboard-box grow-your-own kit; the
humidity was about right. I suspect he grew some black mold, also, but we
didn’t know much about black mold up here in the north back in those days.
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| Many Sunflowers; Deb Marshall photo |
Bomb shelters wouldn’t have saved us then, and the modern
equivalent won’t now. The bombs are bigger, and mad men are in charge of wielding
them. There may be some deep bunkers that could potentially protect a small
number of people for a while – but they’ll either live out the remainder of
their lives there, or emerge to a ravaged, ruined land, where nothing we
recognize exists – if they ever can come safely out. It won’t be you and me in
those deep bunkers, and I’m pretty sure the folks who are invited into them
won’t have the survival skills to exist in the world that would be left. I’m
not sure anyone has those survival
skills. We won’t be able to fix it. If you doubt that, just take a look at the
excellent job we did fixing New Orleans so it would never flood again after its
last disaster; and the remarkable planning and execution of systems we’ve put
in place to safeguard the west coast to
avert major tragedy when the inevitable, and long-overdue, earthquake causes a
large part of California to fall off into the ocean. Maybe the North Koreans
will ignore Trump long enough for the earthquake to happen – from all reports,
that will pretty much destroy about half the country on its own, and it’ll save
them the trouble. For that matter, just waiting as Trump continues his path of
destruction of life as we know it will be very effective.
The moon is full, and the orb-that-changes-color-at-night in
my garden is more visible now that many of the tomato plants are in the compost.
I look out the window and my heart quickens with joy: the orb in the garden,
the solar lights on the wart rails, the sound of crickets and toads, the owl
who hoo-hoos in the near distance. If winter ever arrives this year, my freezer
is filled with peaches and tomatoes and corn and beans and there are baskets of
squashes under the table in the dining room. Half of my heart is filled with
satisfaction and comfort; the other half trembles in fear.
I hope, if the time comes and those-with-connections are scurrying
to get into their deep burrows, they leave Trump and his gang of destroyers out
in the rain.
For the blog, 9 October
2017: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com
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| The Last Hibiscus; Deb Marshall photo |
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