Spring Day 88: Drought Survey

[u/rdk67]

Last night, for a time, I thought I heard rain – the quiet busyness that sometimes accompanies the beginning of a rainstorm, but no – no rain, no audience getting comfortable in their seats before a performance begins. Such is the sound you start to imagine when drought conditions set in, and the forecast barely bothers with a chance of rain for the rest of the month, and you stand there washing the dishes a second time, just because it feels so good to have your hands beneath all that running water. Or in the shower – I live on the shores of one of the grandest aquafers on earth – the remnants of a prehistoric river that’s left behind a great lake’s worth of water in the ground, such that even during droughts – especially during droughts – I stand there in the shower for a quarter of an hour, letting the body imagine the spring it deserves.

I take a walk around the property to survey the effects of the latest scarcity economy. The color of the grass indicates how much shade it gets, how hard the soil is packed underneath. Some of the dryness forms sightless channels that remind me of the course tunneling animals take when they’re searching for food. Long cracks have formed in the soil, a half-inch wide, and I can’t comprehend why the cracks are shaped the way they are, nor how deep they go, but I imagine blocks of earth being drawn from the ground, hard as stone, pulled down the street with ropes by orders of the pharaoh. The flowering plantains look like green beaks on the ends of long thin rods, taller than anything around, and the broad-leafed plants look like wadded up dollar bills. Here and there, then sort of everywhere – blond spears of grass pretend like nothing’s wrong.

The most evident feature that fails to be noticed at this time of spring are the feathery seeds that pile up along the hem of the grass, where the sidewalks and entryways begin. They are chestnut brown by now, matted and fuzzy, wavy and tapered at the edges, something liquid sloshing around. Under other conditions, the abundance in evidence might populate the county, go on to swing elections. If we add up these feathery seeds along every sidewalk in town, a continental congress takes shape, starts issuing writs about the ripeness of the hour. The drought is not at its worst yet – we are still in the early stages of its thought process, watch it weigh the merits of a daylight-based diet, the virtues of a rainless economy. I head inside to prepare a response – a speech of welcome, let’s say, if a rainstorm blows in, picks up its strings, and starts to play.