Endless summer

Every day I get up and it’s the same: sunshine, blue skies, warmth.

You’d think I would be delighted with this. It’s perfect weather for hiking, walking, or just sitting on the deck. We don’t have to run the noisy heater. Don’t have to schlep raincoats, or worry about Tom slipping on a wet floor. Got an extra two harvests of basil from the deck.

Yet I long for rain.

Long for the cool gray skies, the thrumming of water, the mist that rises from the valley up the sides of the mountains. I miss the rain the way I miss my parents – every day – mourning.

This endless summer isn’t youthful. I’m fighting for any kind of normalcy. In the past year, nothing has been normal. Not my home, not Tom, not my own brain. My life has been disrupted on the deepest levels.

And it’s almost November and the damn sun keeps shining.

I want rain because it’s fall and it’s supposed to rain in the fall. The temperatures are supposed to go down. I’m supposed to be emptying the basil pots and pulling my sweaters out of storage. I’m supposed to be taking photos of leaves in that beautiful diffuse light, and checking on the supply of firewood. Supposed to curl up under a fleece blanket and read for hours.

The light is too bright. It hurts my eyes. It makes me squirm.

It feels as though it will never rain again.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

We’re not talking any more about preventing climate change. We can only deal with it, adjust, mitigate.

I don’t have to wonder any more about whether that tree will fall on the house, or whether Tom will have a stroke. It did, and he did.

I can only be here, now. Gazing at the sunlight on dying leaves, roaming the spacious rental house, watching Tom take a nap.

Today’s penny is a 2015, when the endless summer began.