Written sometime last summer.
It is raining today, for the first time in a few weeks. The weather has been cool yet not the freezing weather we expect this time of year when the rains stop. It is during the transition from oceanic rain to continental blue skies that we usually get our snow, or worse still - ice storms. During the ice storms snow falls at night then melts and freezes on all the shrubbery, dragging everything down under the weight and sometimes breaking trees completely off their roots.
Last summer we had a few weeks of hot dry weather. It was making me apprehensive about maintaining my garden. The garden was looking good after a long cold wet summer. I have come to understand that cold wet weather is the weather preferred by rhododendrons. I am weak in faith. I always assume that the current weather is what I will experience for the remainder of my life. So now I firmly believe that it will always be dark and rainy every day. It is four PM and the light is already fading. The impulse is to hibernate in some warm cozy bright cubbyhole, a place such as my home office. It would seem that I am not a rhododendron, however much I might wish to spend my days standing in the rain with my roots buried in earth and mulch, waiting patiently through the centuries for each ecstatic moment of sudden bloom.
I have been touring my garden and many of the rhododendrons are covered with flower buds. If the winter is not too harsh my springtime will be extravagant with flowers. At my age (not even one of the centuries of rhododendrons) the anticipation is almost as good as the event itself. Things happens just as they have happened for millions of years before my birth and I greet them as if I were one who has been here all along. "There you are," I think. "You are back again. It is just as though you had never left. Nor have you been forgotten while you were gone. In my faithless way I wistfully thought that you might never return, yet somehow the world has come back to life." Is this what they meant when they spoke of the return of Christ. Perhaps some people of great faith understood that perfectly.
Last summer after a couple of weeks of bright hot dry weather I was pretty sure the whole world was going to dry up and die - even though everything was yet looking good from all the previous wet weather. I could feel my skin burning and cracking even though I never exposed myself to the weather and we had (newly installed) air conditioning to protect me from the heat. I was prepared to linger and suffer for a time after the end of times. After that time when the sun grows into its red giant phase and engulfs the earth. I will need a stronger bubble and better air conditioning.
Then the ocean returned, rising up from the Puget lowlands and threading its way among the trees. I imagined that I could smell the salt and the seaweed in the air. It was a small change actually. I went outside and enjoyed the wetness and the coolness. I pulled alien weeds from my patch of forest and planted more exotic and more difficult aliens in their place.
The summers of 2017 and 2018 were very hot and dry. Our water bill was extravagant. Certain people with less climate sense than mine predicted the extinction of the Western Red Cedar (with its love of moisture). Certainly there were a lot of dying trees in the forests: both hemlocks and cedars. All of my larger trees are well. I believe that the Western Red Cedar is safe for at least fifty years in this area, even with climate change. Someday perhaps it will grow happily on the shores of the arctic ocean, and probably as an immigrant in many other northerly and southerly locations. Perhaps even across the southern sea where now only glaciers and ice bergs grow.
