February Brown And Green

Our weather here in New Home continues to frustrate:  we oscillate between what could effectively be considered as early Summer days and lows at night that remind one that we still remain in the relative depths of Winter.

Our cold fronts, when they come, are not the generally slow moving cold fronts that I remember of my youth, a gradual transition that happens over days.  They are wild sorts of things, violent in their arrival, wrenching the trees from side to side, hurling yellow clouds hither and yon to the detriment of allergy sufferers everywhere.  Even I, who have been largely immune for years to the local versions of pollens, find myself sneezing uncontrollably and reaching for a combination of something to wipe my nose and allergy medication to hopefully let me function without having to close my eyes and restrain sneezes every 10 seconds.

It is undoubtedly frustrating and disorienting to the plant life as well:  our trees, having weathered a freeze that cracked branches and shattered trunks, now find themselves assaulted by the other extreme of heat.  Wind cracks branches already failing but not collapsed and so, a new tunnel of branches along the roads is likely.  This is also our second leaf fall:  beyond the usual sorts of dead leaves that would always fall will be the addition of the shocked leaves that fall and the withered leaves from branches now dead but that no-one noticed until now.  They fall upon the grasses which were sun-scorched and water deprived from the last Summer, leaving everything a dreary, dead brown mess.

Raking - one of my least favorite tasks - yields piles of decayed leaves and dead grass in piles that resemble not the classic red-brown piles of Norman Rockwell but the cinders of burnt out volcanoes, dotting the landscape as if the tectonic plates themselves were creating an island chain in my yard, to be captured into containers before the wind scatters them or simply blows back to cover what appears to be a row of dead lawns down the street, bodies laid in order on the coroner's tables.

There is life still, of course - but it is the life of the native plants that thrive in this environment as they have for thousands of years.  They rise a little every day, green and thriving, almost reaching the point of need to be trimmed, making a mockery of everything that society and social constructs have spent time and money putting in place.  These plants exist not for the benefit and pleasure of the homeowner but for their own purposes, living a life in ordered society of the landscape but at this moment living a life beyond the landscape and its conditions.  The cultivated and cultured struggle and die, while the uncultivated and not cultured seem to thrive in exactly the same conditions.

I watch the the wind swirl the dead leaves and grass even as it riffles the living green into waves that hide and over-run the dead things surrounding it.  Life, as Michael Crichton said, will find a way.  It is those who demand of it to find it in their way and in their confines that are always surprised.

The grasses, of course, always knew that they would grow.