It’s a seemingly intractable part of the aging process to find oneself missing “the way things used to be” — those days softly tinted by the mists of memory, days whose remembered “simplicity” existed for us only by virtue of the essential ignorance that accompanies childhood. It’s not, mostly, that it was better; only that back then, we didn’t have to know so much that was terrible. And much of what was terrible is actually improved now, as rights have been increasingly codified into law.
What’s more disorienting is the fact that now, those old patterns, the way things used to be, the “good old days,” were a scant five or ten years ago.
I’m referring, of course to something much deeper than mere generational memory. However self-indulgent society is over so-called midlife crises, we find ourselves now in the throes of an existential crisis, and existential change to accompany it.
I look out the window, and I do not see the first days of summer here. It looks like a mix of late spring and early autumn, fields just a little too yellow, maples edged with a little too much red, skies too pale and air too clear and chilly for the dawn of summer at Red Willow. Here, the monsoon season should be in early but full swing, indigo skies bracing already-towering thunderheads as we approach midday.
The skies should be a mix of cornflower and cobalt, the leaves a large lush canopy overhead. We should already see the storm in the middle distance, rain racing out of the sky to deliver its medicine to the southwest ridgeline.
At this season, you can see whole cities in the sky, whole cultures, whole civilizations at work: the spirits of sky and storm, building a prospering earth below.
Here at Red Willow, the rains are the work of summer.
Or, rather, you used to be able to see them. Today, the thunderheads are as thin as the blue of the surrounding sky.
The rains are hardly the only work of summer here, of course. For us mere mortals, the labor is long and hard: irrigation, planting, cultivation, weeding, cutting, baling, loading, stacking. And at this point in the season, it’s only begun; there are many more weeks of work ahead. But this year, there is no water in the pond, and the land is already tinged with brown.
A couple of years ago, trees and pond were both full and lush.
The willows still hang heavy, but they are not as green as they were two years ago. There is no water pooled between them to catch and hold the face of the sky. Last year’s drought still lingers, and despite the early unseasonal weather, we risk another summer of diminished water.
The spring winds linger, too — frequently stronger now than they were in March, powerful enough to send the willow fronds horizontal and the aspens bending to the earth. Yesterday, it was a trickster wind that tore through the new-cut hay, a dust devil lifting it and flinging it against the chicken coop fence. Today, the loading and stacking occurs in a constant cloud of dust, the open air of the barn veiled in a brown haze.
Our colors are different this year, too. Perhaps “different” is not quite accurate; more to the point, they are occurring out of time. We might be expected to have plenty of late-afternoon rainbows now, but we’ve only had only one occurrence in recent weeks. Either rain or light have been insufficient to produce them now.
And yet, there are rainbows of another sort, not melded together in a unified arc but scattered to and upon the winds, dancing: the rusty flared wings of a soaring red-tailed hawk, here long after her usual departure date; the white and sulphurs and bright yellow of the swallowtail. It is an odd year indeed when we are presented simultaneously with the stark black and white of fledgling magpies on the same day that an orange and black monarch butterfly appears, two months ahead of its appointed time.
They are rainbow, yes, and a riot of color, too, but there’s nothing especially orderly or graceful about their manifestations. They are, however, illuminating in uniquely discomfiting ways: Their very presence here, together, sharing time and space and place out of order is an indicator of just how far this existential change has advanced, mostly without the world noticing.
We notice. And now we must learn to adapt.
Last year, the sunflowers were shocked into silence by drought; there was no question adaptation. Perhaps half a dozen of their kind appeared over the course of the entire season, no more. This year, the berms are dry and bare, and whether these wild children of the sun will be able to break through, the breathe, to be?
It’s early days yet, but it’s an open question, and a troubling one. Without the rains, who will lift their faces to the light?
For now, the work continues apace; we cannot predict with any accuracy what the rest of the season holds, and perhaps the forecast will be accurate after all: true monsoonal patterns to resume on Saturday, and continue for the duration of the long-range forecast.
If the forecast is wrong, the work grows that much harder.
Humanity collectively has perhaps not done much to inspire the confidence of the spirits, nor to engage their benevolence and trust. That is certainly true of colonial cultures, who dismiss their gifts and their very existence out of hand. But their existence does not depend on anyone’s belief or approval.
We know of their existence, made all the more poignantly obvious by their relative absence. For this season, we hope that they intend to join us — after the hay is in, of course — as we recommit ourselves to the work of summer.
~ Aji
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