Drought
Imagine how the country will look by the end of summer. Frankly I can’t. It is already so grizzled, and we are only at the beginning of the journey that will take us, eventually, to rain and normality. If it can ever be normal again.
Even the native trees - big eucalypts that have surely survived any number of fires and droughts - are looking desperate. There has been no burst, this spring, of reddy-green new growth at their tips. They are just hanging on grimly. I can’t imagine how deep their roots go. Probably far down to the subterranean springs that honeycomb this city.
Even these springs are drying up. Bores have run dry. There is barely a blade of grass alive in the local park. In this scary dry, it is possible to see the structure of our lives more clearly. Friends of mine who live on a farm discovered a leak in the pipe that leads from the dam to the house, purely by observing an odd green patch in the grass.
I confess I am finding this drought quite frightening, even though I know that this country will always have droughts. Certainly, this is the worst I have experienced, and the meteorological records tell us that it is one of the worst on record.
The normal meaning of the seasons is reversed. Spring and summer are normally times of rebirth and growth. Usually, by early December, I am harvesting all the sweet watery vegetables of summer, and feeling rich and contented. Now, the European trees are dropping leaves because of water stress, and so mid-summer feels like a nasty kind of autumn.
You can feel the dryness in the air, even on cool days.. It is not the normal dryness one feels after a week or so without rain. It is a crackly, clear, sharp dry. I have never felt anything quite like it before.
Perhaps it fits the state of the world, this feeling of dislocation and tenuousness - of implicit threat to normality. I know it will come to an end - that it will rain again, and that at least some things will survive.
I just can’t imagine what that will be like, or where life will have taken me in the months between now, and rain.
Hint: Put out saucers of water during the drought, and even in the suburbs you will find an enormous variety of birds and animals come to visit. Make sure cats and dogs are kept inside!
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POSTED IN: Environment, Freebies
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