Monday again, and the start of a new so-called work-week that is supposed to be filled with rain.
At the moment, no one from outside would believe it possible, given the puffy white clouds scudding across a cornflower sky. Of course, it seems that the weather people don’t much believe it, either, given that they’ve dropped our chances of precipitation from fifty-eight percent to fifteen at best.
Then again, it was five percent yesterday, and between dusk and dawn we were granted two or three small but steady showers courtesy of late-passing storms. And even now, the white towers moving in toward El Salto’s northwest ridgeline have begun to develop heavy bases the color of blue slate.
The weather has been suffocatingly hot during the day, but as soon as the storm arrives, the mercury plunges by a quick twenty degrees, If the rain falls before sunset, it will rise again before dark, but even momentary relief is a blessing these days.
When I awakened this morning and opened the drapes that face south, I was struck anew by the sudden greening of the fields beyond. Oh, it’s nothing like the alfalfa in the image above, dancing tall and bright in the summer rain, but after the last half-decade, which saw those same fields burned to brown ash in the drought only three short weeks ago? This is the gift of the rainy season that we never dared to expect.
The subject of this week’s photo meditation shows one of the other great gifts of this season, one notably lacking in recent years: that of the fullness of the light. In English it’s called the rainbow; some cultures, now badly appropriated, refer to it as a serpent; in my own language, depending on region, there are several different words for it, all based around form and function; Wings’s language is not meant for outsiders. But historically, this glowing arc manifest in the full spectrum of color has been one of the traditional visiting spirits of summer here, sometimes on a daily basis.
And so it has been noticeable by its absence.
The Earth’s current straits should be enough for us to need no reminder about the folly of taking circumstances for granted, but much of humanity seems determined to do exactly that, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. The disappearance of the rainbow is a reminder to us, in glowing Technicolor, so to speak, never to forget this fundamental lesson.
Of course, the green of the fields, or lack thereof, performs a similar function: When Wings captured this image of the southeast field, we were only in a five-hundred-year drought still. He shot this in digital format, on a summer’s late afternoon probably somewhere between 2014 and 2016. At that time, it was still possible to believe that we could, with work, ride this out, but we didn’t know then how badly the land’s days were numbered. It was, in fact, 2016 and 2017 that constituted our last “good” years in climatic terms; by early 2018, we knew that we were in trouble. Between then and now, that five-hundred-year drought became a twelve-hundred-year record, and the soil aridified, and the trees began to die. By this year, the red willows of place and people were dying, as well, and we bore witness to the area’s earliest and worst wildfire season in recorded history. We have watched the ponds evaporate and the streams go dry and the water level of the Great River fall to nothing in places right at its very center.
We have grieved land and water and labored through it all, trying desperately to save even just this small space for future generations.
We have succeeded a bit in some places, failed desperately in others, and through it mourned it all.
And so the rainbow’s return seems, somehow, much more than a gift: It seems an omen, a harbinger of things to come, provided we put in the work. We know that it is not, in a reversal of Dickens’s query by his protagonist, things that must be, but rather things that might be, with time and effort and attention and not a little prayer. We cannot let up now; the work is ever more urgent.
But it’s a start.
~ Aji
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