It’s still April, but barely. In the dark of the earliest hours of the 30th, I wake to pitch dark and silence. Unusually dark and silent. Electricity’s out. I try to go back to sleep—the conditions are ideal, after all—but disturbing thoughts about the possible cause of a power outage insert themselves. What steals into…
The thing about the world as we’re coming to know it now—a world in the process of changing at timescales we can perceive from the relatively puny span of a human adulthood—isn’t just that extremes pile up. No, the thing is that these extremes cozy up to one another in bizarre and frankly disturbing ways.…
The fear that a bad fire season would be in the offing come summer lurked in the background for months. The prickle of anxiety persisted through the windy days of March and April. It lingered while I planted the garden, and stayed in the back of my mind as the weeds popped up and I…
I knew these days would come. In late spring for the last several years, I have nagged myself to remember—and be grateful for—the luxury of going into summer with moisture in the ground. How pleasant those days were. I didn’t have to witness the slow crisping of tender young leaves, didn’t have to stand by…
The crisp weather I associate with fall arrived early this year. The grasses and wildflowers and weeds that had shot up in June matured, set seed, and began to spin the landscape into gold by mid-August. If clouds bothered to assemble at all, they lost interest in organizing themselves into thunderheads. The cloudless sunrises typical…