One day the rain just stops. A day goes by, a few days, then a week, then more weeks. You notice that the grass is getting brittle and dry and the ground is rock hard. Then the grass turns the color of sand and even the air seems brittle with the dryness of it. The weather reports become numbingly uniform: sunny every day. Reports of record-breaking temperatures become repetitive. Something in the back of your mind says that this is wrong, but the heat saps any energy you might have for thinking about it.
On your way home from work each night you start counting the number of neighbors who are watering their yards, the ones who stand out because their grass is a patch of emerald in a sea of buff and sepia. You get wicked ideas about sneaking into their yards and cutting their hoses with a pair of garden shears in the middle of the night. Maybe they’ll pay a fine for using so much water.
Maybe you should think about xeriscaping, but this isn’t the desert. The rain will come back eventually, won’t it?
Desiccated tree branches fall in the yard. No need to move them just yet. The lawnmower sits in the garage, its small reservoir of fuel sending out a slow stream of fumes.
One morning you notice a spider hanging in her web next to your house. She’s brown and white speckled with big yellow dots on her abdomen. You saw her early in the spring, just like you watched her mother, her grandmother, and a whole line of her great-grandmothers going back several years. She clambers around, connecting the spokes of her web.
The lack of rain affects everything up and down the food chain, and you haven’t seen as many rabbits, snakes, or even squirrels as usual. This spider, like you, is not native to North America; her ancestors probably came with yours, around three centuries ago. She’s nocturnal so it’s strange that she’s still out on a sunny morning when the temperature is already higher than it would be at noon in a normal year.
You fill a birdbath in the backyard. You fill another in the front yard. You watch cardinals, bluejays, even a sleek-headed crow dip their beaks in it. You watch squirrels come to drink then flip the birdbath over. It’s only a few minutes before you go to put it back and refill it but the ground is already dry.
You have a side bed of morning glories and other small plants. After the sun goes down you turn the nozzle on the hose to “mist” and you realize you can’t remember the last time you heard a tree frog. They always sing in the dark after it rains.
Leaves turn brown and fall even though it’s only late summer. A seven-foot branch falls from a tree. The broken end is reddish, dry, and dusty.
Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and even tsunamis are all horrible, often tragic events that come in suddenly, sometimes with no warning, or not enough warning, but then they disappear, often as quickly as they came. Floods and tsunamis recede, wildfires burn out all their fuel or, hopefully, are stopped, and tornadoes just spin themselves out.
A drought is a tragedy in slow motion.
And then one day it rains. It rains and rains, and it’s like a fever breaking. There’s a puddle that frames clouds bronzed with sun, and it looks deep enough to be a whole new world.
Wow! This was so beautifully written. I felt it so deeply, especially that ending. Brilliant.
Every few years we get a drought–it seems to be happening more and more often now thanks to climate change–but as I was writing this we had a period of rain that really transformed everything. So with that and some other things going on I felt really hopeful and wanted to convey that.
Thanks for this beautifully written piece, Chris — we are all thirsty for posts like yours.
I always enjoy it when your comments rain down, Ann.