This is how it is then. Walking down the road in the middle of October, the driest October ever. The winds wrestle between cool and warm, east and west. This is how it is getting older. You imagine what it will be like someday but most of us decide it’s not for us. Think we can will it away. Now the leaves are brown and the evergreens are rust-colored, dropping their fronds. Most of what holds these trees up is unseen. They only live to stand, it seems. They fall, and that is expected too. More life grows out of the fallen, it’s like having kids.

All is quiet on a Sunday morning walking to the lake. But for these strange winds that make the leaves rattle, it could be like a cornfield in the middle of nowhere, the sound of dry, papery husks. A tree frog croaks like a barn door swinging on a hinge. Yet when you come to the lake it is still the same. It is good to find something as you remembered it. It is reassuring that the world is how it’s always been, how you expected it. That’s for you and your view of the world. It’s also something to think, it will be like this when you are gone. And part of you will remain, for all these times you came here to honor it. This is the way we think.

Tiny life flickers about when I run the hose. Birds, bugs, frogs find the drips and drabs in the system. The lip around the planter pot where the water collects, the leaking spout pooling in the dirt. All that life unseen around the edges comes to the surface now. All that life surrounds us, though more and more it seems we forgot.

Categories: prose, writing

Tags: climate change, creative nonfiction