Bad Poetry: Go West, Rain

"Though our traditions served us well,

No longer must we wait

On them," said the young fool in the north.

"Now we have glyphosate.

Instead of burning strips of pine trees

We might easily sell,

We'll kill all other things but pines

That dry and burn so well."

And so they did, that spring. That summer

Miles of pine trees burned;

The smoke lay heavy on the land.

Yet autumn soon returned.

Fools don't learn. That's what makes them fools.

Next year they did the same.

For many miles away, folks choked

On smoke. They were to blame.

"Though glyphosate is killing people,

We can spare some numbers,"

The old fool in the south said. "Onward

The Economy lumbers!

Let more old folk die younger! Let

The young produce more babies!

And have a War, to thin the herd!

And..." you know. Christian? Maybe his

Claim to conversion's real, but his brain's

Not attuned to the Spirit,

And he must be struck down and blinded

So that he can hear it.

Is poison worse if made in China?

So he bloviated.

Who sells you poison's not your friend.

Hunched in his web, he waited

To see more spraying in the north

Bring back the choking pall

Of smoke that drifts from north to south.

Then, well known for his gall,

He blamed the north for fouling air

People breathe in the south,

And, far from help to fight the fire

Before the south's own drought...

Forgive us, Lord, both south and north.

The east has too much rain,

While once again a deadly drought

Has gripped the central plain.

Please waken people in the north,

Convict them of their sins,

And westward blow our surplus rain,

So everybody wins.

(Cut-off point for tired eyes)

For those who've not been paying attention...These are just some popular links from Google. If you dig you can rake up even muckier stories, conspiracy theories, etc. I don't want to bother. This is a legitimate news story the CBC, the BBC, Reuters, etc., have covered, but not publicized well due to their Trusted News Initiative mandate to smother stories about what's wrong with sponsors' profitable products under layers of celebrity gossip and silly quibbles. The big US news outlets have tried to avoid this story altogether. Ignoring it's not going to make it go away.

Canada's spraying glyphosate on the old forests that might be considered among its great treasures:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/glyphosate-spraying-wildfires-1.7627844

 

Canada's claim on reciprocal help to fight its ensuing wildfires:

https://globalnews.ca/news/11969816/canada-us-wildfire-support/

Trump's un-neighborly and hubristic response to that claim:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/trump-says-he-told-carney-that-canada-must-get-wildfires-under-control-2026-07-20/

The Cat Sanctuary is currently in one of those weather patterns, described in old British and Western European folklore, where rain on (local lore disagrees on exactly which day) a certain day in early July indicates that more rain is going to fall on every one of the next forty days. In the US this rain usually occurs as part of thunderstorms. The lights didn't go out yesterday or last night but I unplugged the computers, just in case, four times. One day last week, by chance, rain didn't fall on the Cat Sanctuary itself but we could see it a few miles away. Tennessee had floods the weekend before last. New York City had floods last weekend. We could spare a little of that rain, and how gladly we would, if it were in our power to send a good natural water-bombing to Canada.

But who knows? If Canadians confess and renounce their sins, show a healthy distrust of those in the US and China trying to sell them more of the poison that plays such an obvious role in this sudden explosion of wildfires, maybe God will help us all with a helpful weather pattern. It's worth trying.

This poem was provoked by last weekend's Poets & Storytellers United prompt. Google's blog feed has been malfunctioning recently so I received the link only on Monday night. The poem that came to mind seemed topical enough for a Thursday post here, so here it is. I'll try to post a more cheerful poem to the PSU link-up on Friday, as well as the one on Substack.

Napowrimo 4.4.26: Weather

Though April's long been known for showers

the weather I like best

is not the best for all the flowers.

I'd give the showers a rest

(though some think this low taste betrays

some loyalty to the West).

I like a bit of wind in days

just this side of the border

between dryness and drought, always

in balance and good order.

I can't have too much sky bright blue;

I'd gladly be its hoarder.

(If nobody had sprayed a mix of glyphosate and other poisons into the air, this week's weather would have been my idea of perfect.) 

The Blizzard of'93

(Obviously this was meant to go live in 2023, but why waste it? Maybe it's a good thing to think about winter storms before we start seeing them.)

If you listen to the baby-boomers at the Weather Service, in Georgia and Tennessee the snowstorm of the twentieth century was the Blizzard of 1993.

Pooh. That's like saying the late summer storm of the twentieth century was Hurricane Floyd. If 1993 was Floyd, 1997 was Camille...at the Cat Sanctuary, anyway. Other people's memories differ.

Well...it was March, so people weren't expecting a major snow. In most of the Southern States nobody ever expects more than two feet of snow at a time. The Weather Service saw the Blizzard coming--up from Georgia--and whoever heard of a big snowstorm coming from the south? 

Anyway, Thursday, the eleventh of March, had been chilly but not cold. Some flowers were starting to bud, if not bloom. It had been a long cold winter; we'd seen our usual quota of snow. 

Friday, the wind turned cold, and snow started to fall, and it didn't stop. 

For some reason Gate City didn't get the full effect of the Blizzard of'93. It was Big Snow. We don't usually get Big Snow twice in one year, and we'd already had one, so it was unusual. It wasn't deeper than my boot tops. It was easy to walk through. 

Kingsporters, however, will tell you they never saw such a snow in all their lives. 

Now, the Weather Service admits that all Kingsport actually logged was 14 inches of snow. They'd seen more snow than that at one time before, and they have since. Maybe it was just that the roads weren't salted and froze faster than usual as the temperature dropped faster than usual. Partly it was that most Southerners would rather crawl on their knees than try to drive in snow, and most of the ones who do try to drive in snow shouldn't. Mostly it was that cyclone winds were lifting snow off the ground even as more was falling out of the sky, so people couldn't see the road before them clearly. Kingsporters aren't accustomed to that. They use the word "blizzard" to mean Big Snow. This was a real one.

Anyway, only emergency vehicles were on the roads for hours, and many people who had gone to work on Friday morning spent the weekend at work.

In what are normally called "the higher elevations" in my part of Virginia, which do not include my home, things were even worse. Somewhere in the town of Wise they measured 30 inches of fresh snow; after the blizzard people photographed evidence of 48" drifts. 

The worst inconvenience for most people was, as usual, the power grid. As usual, trees dropped snow-crusted limbs across power lines and power lines went down. Nobody had electricity for many days...

Except the retirees in what had not yet become Bedbug Towers. They had gasoline generators. Big ones, that could, in sequence, keep the building heated and lighted for four or five days. By a peculiar coincidence that was about how long the power outage lasted; it was still possible for the company to direct linemen to reconnect them first, the "grid" mania hadn't made it commonplace for our whole town to be blacked out because a pole cracked in Kentucky. Neighborhoods' grids were still fairly well separated. So the retirees' frozen food stayed frozen, they bathed in hot running water, and most of them had adult children and grandchildren visit them to take advantage of these conveniences.

My father had just moved into his dimly lighted, easily accessible flat, and set up a new radio to listen to the weather news on WJCW, which put the usual ball games and talk shows on "pause" and broadcast Blizzard reports all weekend. He spent much of the weekend sitting by the radio. He called what he was doing "rooting" rather than praying, because it was neither a formal prayer service nor a mystical contemplative kind of prayer; I'd call it a kind of praying. His opinions of most people were low, but he did care about them and want hardship conditions to be relieved. Most people had land-line telephones back then; many of the telephones worked when the electricity didn't, so Dad was buzzing all his cousins on the phone, checking on their families and relaying reports about situations that might be alleviated. 

There were a lot of those situations. People who weren't in any real danger, but were just unprepared, kept calling WJCW and wringing their hands. "We're stranded without heat" was the usual wail. Instead of playing pop songs the radio DJs were broadcasting, "Another report of a household without heat in  This town on That road," and people were calling in, "I have kerosene if someone can deliver it," "I have a Coleman stove," "I have a spare generator," and emergency responders were delivering these things. It was a once-in-a-lifetime weekend. Thank goodness.

Rebecca Solnit has written books, one titled Paradise Built in Hell, about weekends like that one. There's a "high," an actual measurable adrenalin rush akin to what people feel in battle or fighting fires, and akin to what they feel on learning to swim or ride a bicycle. You open your eyes, realize you're still alive, and start noticing all the things you can do. 

"Where're you going?" your grumpy old relative growls as you start to leave the building.

"Out to clear a path!" you carol. Normally the retirement project has people who clear the paths and mow the grass and so on. Today it's obvious that those people won't get in for some time, so you shovel. 

Part of what makes this so memorable for baby-boomers is that, in 1993, nearly all of us could still enjoy shovelling snow. We knew we'd wake up with stiff muscles in the morning, but most of us didn't have rheumatic joints or bad backs or bad knees to worry about.

You go out and shovel your snow. You see Neighbor A. A can't get to work and would like to get paid for shovelling snow. You refer him to B, who can afford to pay. B knows of a way to get to where you had planned to spend the weekend. You get into the truck of the person B knows, and soon come to a house where a tree has fallen across the driveway. B's friend C has a saw so you get out and stack up wood while C saws...You are healthy and strong and alive. The blood tingles through your veins. You feel fine. You feel so fine that, when you come to a store that someone has dared to open, you go in and buy oranges for C's children. And so on. All weekend long.

Nature didn't intend for this "high" to last very long, yet some religious people, medical people, and emergency responders feel a vocation to live according to the insights the "high" brought them. Solnit documented that whole, viable intentional communities have formed as people worked to recover from natural disasters.

If not intentional communities, at least neighborhood spirit tends to rise after people have been through hard times together. Kingsport, Bristol, and Johnson City are the "Tri-Cities" for which the airport was named. For people in Gate City, Kingsport is almost (but not quite) home; many of us never walked into Kingsport but, in the twentieth century, that was only because walking ten miles takes time. Bristol is a place we visited occasionally, not necessarily in every single year. Johnson City is further into Tennessee than most of us have any reason to drive--an exception, of course, being students who used to go to East Tennessee State University rather than UVa or Virginia Tech because it's closer to home. During the Blizzard, though, Johnson City was where the radio station broadcast the reports that helped people help each other. A family there might have something a family here needed, or vice versa. Suddenly people in Johnson City started to seem like neighbors, in the extended or New Testament sense of people who may not live on an adjacent lot but who are near enough to help or to be helped.

In its way, the Blizzard of'93 was fun. "The perfect storm," someone told a newspaper reporter, because, in about as much time as it took people to enjoy helping each other repair the damage, the snow melted away. During the next week the early-blooming flowers started to bloom. Anyway, although some trees were lost and there was a report of a roof caving in, the Blizzard of'93 did very little lingering damage to Gate City or Kingsport.

Every winter has a storm. Some are worse than others. The awfulness of different storms in different neighborhoods varies, but everybody can always count on at least a few days of inconvenience.

We can't always afford to be as well prepared as we'd like to be...Be prepared, Gentle Readers.

Status Update: Excursion with Ruminations

I went into town yesterday. This has become a rare occurrence rather than a daily commute. I hate to say it but I was in better condition when it was a daily commute; ninety-degree heat shouldn't bother me...

Ninety-degree heat, yes. At the Cat Sanctuary the sun beating down on the metal roof had raised the temperature on my front porch from about 75 to a little over 80 degrees Fahrenheit when I walked out the door. Not a mile further along, once I'd reached the paved highway, the dashboard thermometer of the person who offered a lift was reading 93 in the sun, 92 when the car passed through shade--and this I could believe. It was a lot hotter near the pavement than it was up on the hill, among the trees.

Local climate change is well distributed around the world but it is not global climate change. The temperature changes we're seeing are far beyond even the most alarming indicators of potential global climate change (which could happen, but I'm not likely to be here long enough to know whether it ever does). They are also very local.

I happened to be near a television set that was broadcasting the local weather news and forecast. The local weather news showed absolutely typical July weather, the weather of my childhood and, according to them, my grandparents' childhood, in the smaller towns surrounding Kingsport and Bristol: temperatures around 70, even lower at higher elevations overnight, rising up to 80 or 85 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime. For Kingsport's weather station, which is still closer to the river than to the streets where Kingsporters actually live, overnight lows were in the 80s, the afternoon high at the weather station would be about 90, and the 90% humidity would make it feel more like 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Ten-degree difference. (Before the overpavement along Stone Drive, it was two or three degrees. Before the slum was built, it was five or six degrees.) Now remember that in Gate City I'd seen a ten-degree difference between my home, which is basically an orchard, and the paved highway. In Kingsport, around the slum, the actual temperature probably was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The forecast was that it's going to be like this for at least another week.

While walking along Route 23 above Gate City, I heard sirens. Not enough sirens for a fire or police call. Only one vehicle was using only one siren, only intermittently. So someone was being taken to the hospital. Likely that would be some older person, out of condition, who'd pushed perself to work outside in the heat. 

I walked very, very slowly in the 93-degree heat. Well, I walked at the pace I usually use around the house, not hurrying, not dawdling, in between patches of shade, where I sat down and rested while the wind off the passing traffic dried off the sweat. I managed to get into town with unsoaked clothing. 

You get a choice, Gentle Readers. How deadly hot do you want summers to be? If you don't want your local summers to be hotter, let trees replace some of the existing construction and paving in your neighborhood. If you want to cash in on anybody's greedhead ideas about "housing," buckle up and brace for longer, hotter summers than you've ever survived before.

That television set was braying about a "need," not in Kingsport but further into Tennessee, for labor in a new quarrying project that was apparently an unwelcome surprise to local people. It was anticipated that people willing to work on this project would not be local and would not want to live in the neighborhood they were about to make ugly. During about an hour of television exposure I heard two commercial ads from different real estate speculators, and the talking head at the news department obligingly repeated and explained a line from the advertisement. Tennessee landowners could legally keep their houses while renting out their land to people who would use the land to build new "housing."

Y'all don't think your summers are hot enough already, in Tennessee? 

Even in Virginia it feels to me as if doing anything useful in this weather really requires gills. I want nothing to do with "housing." If people can't live in (or renovate) existing houses that become available when people die and their heirs want to be somewhere else, that may be an indication that nature intended those people not to move into my town.

I will hear no idiocies about this having anything to do with what people look like. I don't expect to spend enough time looking at them to care if their skins are fluorescent green and they have spiral fluorescent horns instead of fingernails. (Well, if they were that unusual-looking I might at least feel curious about whether they were actors making a movie about space aliens or young people trying to start a kicky rebellious fad that would differ noticeably from any older one. 

It's about how many people need to live in one place, and whether they can walk on gravel paths or think they need pavement and cars, and whether they can raise their own food in a sustainable way (not spraying, but eating, the "weeds"), and whether they can run a neighborhood biomass burner on waste without killing any trees or dumping any sewage in any condition into rivers, and whether they appreciate large farms as natural habitats for large extended families or want to ruin them with "housing" projects, i.e. slums.

Reversing the kind of climate change we can all see and feel and agree on does not require a global dictatorship at all. It requires local self-governing communities to say no to any proposed construction of new "apartment" or "town house" or "row house" buildings, to say that even temporary laborers deserve houses where each person has a room of per own and at least a plot of kitchen garden.

Favorite Things to Do in the Winter

Today's Long & Short Reviews blog prompt invites book reviewers to share our favo(u)rite things to do in the winter. (Part of the fun is that participants live in places that get different kinds of winter weather...)

Right. Virginia has winter, well, right about now. Usually it's what most of the world would call a mild winter. We think any temperature below the freezing point of water is COLD and any snow on the ground is a WEATHER EMERGENCY. It does not take a great number of Southerners trying to drive on snow to make an emergency. It's not hard to enjoy our winter weather, though, if you maintain perspective. 

Here is a Top Ten List of things to do in winter, where I live:

1. Go to a place that does not have winter. This one never was my actual favorite because I'm sensitive to all the chemicals they spray into the air in Florida. However, it's definitely a popular thing to do in winter in Virginia and definitely identifies those who do it as privileged, and when I was a kid we had that privilege because we had relatives in Florida. So. Florida, Texas, California, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, wherever you have relatives, here you come. When writing cheerful postcards on the patio, practice editing skills. Your friends back in Virginia do not want to hear about the palmetto roaches or your chemical sensitivities. Write about shells, winter-blooming flowers, tropical butterflies, migrating birds, and whatever other special attractions the place you visit may have. Perpetuate the myth that you are having fun. Who knows, you might manage to feel that this is true.

2. Alternatively, go to a place that has a "real" winter. This is not popular, but it may impress people. Maine, Vermont, Canada, Pennsylvania, or Michigan might be fun in summer. If you have actual business to take care of in winter, you're tough. I have an eighty-something relative who is taking care of business in Pennsylvania this winter. He is Something Else! I last went north for the winter during the Gulf War. Pittsburgh looks really pretty under a foot or two of snow. People in Pittsburgh don't wail about snow the way we do. They are downright inspiring.

3. Alternatively, go to Gatlinburg. Gatlinburg, Tennessee, is where Southerners go to practice winter sports. The weather does not naturally supply a great deal of snow, but the tourists go there to ski, so they make something for skiing on. They have places for skating, too. Gatlinburg also offers regular hiking, camping, fishing, golf and "miniature golf," and incredibly inane tourist amusements. I think the last time I was there someone was actually charging tourists money for a look at a "Paradise on Earth" (pair o' dice on earth). Gatlinburg is located in between Dollywood and Cherokee Town. Dollywood is best enjoyed with children. Cherokee Town offers entertainment for tourists with or without children. Both are usually visited in summer, but some attractions are open in winter.

4. Or just drive or walk around admiring the holiday light show. At the Bristol Motor Speedway, driving around to see the lights is a traditional charity fundraiser some people feel obligated to do every year. In many residential neighborhoods, too, people like to decorate their houses and trees in enough colored lights to become a cheap tourist attraction. Even little Gate City has its fairy light fanciers and is good for an evening's entertainment for light show fans. Kingsport and Bristol try to offer a day's light watching apiece. Asheville and Knoxville traditionally have their lights too, and for some people nothing will do but to spend a day in Helen, Georgia. For those who don't know, Helen is a consciously touristy German-American town and one of the German traditions they perpetuate is lots of decoration and celebration of the Christmas season.

5. Enjoy the midwinter thaw. Unfortunately for those who really do "dream of a white Christmas," the winter solstice is usually associated with a week or so of mild weather, often with afternoon highs in the fifties or even sixties Fahrenheit. You might as well enjoy it. Walk around without a heavy coat. 

6. Enjoy the snow, in years when we get some. Virginia is not covered in snow every year. When we are, we might as well enjoy that, too. Make snow sculptures. Enjoy the children's extra time off school. Light a fire. Pop corn. Tell stories. 

7. Enjoy your extended family. The winter holidays aren't the real anniversary of the birth of Christ; they are the time when families traditionally gather together. Shop. Cook. Reminisce. Putter around in the garage or the sewing room together. Make a family quilt. 

8. Repair the damage. Especially if there's been snow, a lot of repair work might as well be done now as later. 

9. Explore a cave. The Bristol Caverns are a nice, safe, tourist-friendly introduction to the cave country for which the Cherokee Nation was named. (The names used in English for many indigenous groups came from other ethnic groups' words for "enemies," but Chillukki was an allied group's word for "people from cave country.") Caving is fun in winter because it's almost totally independent of weather. Caves stay cool but never really cold all year. There are some other caves, open to the public but a little more of a challenge, that appeal to people to whom the Bristol Caverns  have become familiar. 

10. Listen to music. When I was growing up, music was one of our principal products. Everyone sang or played, and big-name musicians hung out at venues like the Carter Fold regularly. Two thirds of the kids in the high school chorus, which wasn't even considered to be for serious musicians, have been paid to perform or record music. Now a lot of our musicians have retired or died, and people wonder what will become of our musical traditions. Keep them alive. Play the old records, sing along, and encourage people who are recording new ones. 

Status Update: "Snow," Said Merlin

One of the few influences of pop culture on my childhood was that I've always remembered a scene from a Disney movie that attempts to revive Merlin, King Arthur's court magician, the last of the Druids. "Snow," said Merlin, and it did. It was snowing anyway, someone observed. "Snow harder," said Merlin, and a real American prairie blizzard was instantly raging in Old England...

It is snowing. It has been snowing all week. 

Yesterday I thought, "I've been free from all specifically COVID-type symptoms for a week now. I should go to McDonald's just to show that I'm out of quarantine, and call someone who doesn't have e-mail yet from a store in town...if a store in town still has a phone." Then I thought, "It is below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The road is clear. A neighbor just drove his old heavy truck up the road, with no more difficulty than usual,  hauling in more hay for the cattle. Why should I leave this warm spot on the screen porch and give myself bronchitis, just to go to McDonald's? I am not craving their usually glyphosate-contaminated French fries all that much. If anyone who doesn't have e-mail wants to see me, they can jollywell drive up the road. I can always go to McDonald's on Friday, when a person for whom I work is likely to have been paid and to pay for work done."

So this morning...I looked out the window. It was snowing. "Why should I risk destroying the laptop by hauling it to McDonald's in falling snow, when the Internet is still crawling along on the screen porch? I need work. I need wages. I need to pay the bill for all this lovely electricity I'm using to keep warm. But the person for whom I work can drive out the highway, which is specially treated so that it freezes about twenty degrees Fahrenheit lower than ordinary roads do, so it should be clear. We can meet on the highway, or on the private road. The person worries about bears in summer, but everyone knows bears hibernate through weather like this. I enjoy walking in fresh snow and will do a little of it around the time this person would drive up, if the road were clear, tonight...unless the electricity goes out, in which case I'll probably do more walking to get to a warm place, or the Internet goes completely out, in which case I'll probably go to McDonald's after all." 

The Bible tells us that a virtuous woman is not afraid of snow, because her household is full of warm snowproof clothes and blankets. So it is. 

I am concerned about my cat Silver. Regular readers may remember that she went home with a neighbor's tomcat last week. She hadn't done that before. The tomcat's calling had been loud and full of distress, and from a quick inspection when Silver came home I knew what had happened at this neighbor's house. This is the tomcat I call Trumpkin, because he is a little orange Manx mix who won't go away when he's told to go away. He is a persistent nuisance but not all bad--it depends on your tolerance for tomcats. Trumpkin is quite social. He had persuaded my calico kitten Crayola to elope with him a few summers ago. Evidently something happened to her, because he was very lonely at home, but didn't want to stay here; he wanted someone else to go home with him. Silver's coat smelled like someone else's household cleaning supplies--she had been in a warm, clean room. She had just eaten a full meal, before walking more than half a mile. Trumpkin must have presented Silver to his humans as a new friend of his, and they'd accepted her as a stray or outcast and tried to adopt her. This is not adoption. It is petnapping, I told Silver and Trumpkin. 

"You have a home, Silver," I said aloud, because Silver seems to understand a lot of words. "You are supposed to stay here. We need you here."

"Meow meow meow meow meow MEOW MEOW MEOW," said Trumpkin, aloud. He seemed to be saying, "Don't leave me alone with my humans! I have nobody to talk to!"

"Serena and Pastel have each other," Silver was clearly thinking as she nibbled uninterestedly at the kibble served here. "Trumpkin is all alone. His humans want to spoil a cat with lots of attention and overfeeding. They may have stuffed Crayola to an untimely death, but wotta way to go."

Silver is not a greedy cat but she is a gentle, tenderhearted one. She gets kibble regularly, and fish, chicken, ice cream and sometimes even beef as a treat every few days, at home. She's always interested in an extra treat; she does not overeat and grow fat, even when the opportunity is available. She is very social and more likely to respond to considerations a normal cat wouldn't even notice. Serena has never approved of Silver seeking human attention; only when Serena's not looking has Silver ever purred or cuddled, but she clearly enjoys being petted when it doesn't seem disrespectful to her own mother. Trumpkin's howls of neediness seemed to prevail on her good judgment. She went home with Trumpkin again. She is being snuggled and overfed and spoiled. She has been petnapped, if only by a cat friend!

The first time she strayed off with Trumpkin, around New Year's Day, Silver may honestly have thought I'd dumped out some extra kibble and gone inside to die. I had not, of course. I'd gone inside to sweat out COVID in quarantine. It was cold, and sweating-out makes people vulnerable, so I stayed inside for about sixty hours, but all is well now. Regular meals have resumed. Silver came home and observed that for herself. She is not reacting to food insecurity at home, now. I could see and hear that she was persuaded by sympathy for poor little lonely Trumpkin.

If I knew which house to approach, I'd knock on the door and explain things to Trumpkin's humans. I can help them get a cat of their own to spoil. Maybe two. There are far too many nice cats languishing in the shelters in Kingsport. Silver has a home, and duties, from which she is being Led Astray. We don't need to quarrel about Silver. Those other cats need and deserve a good home. We need to choose a companion for Trumpkin. A nice young lady cat who has already been spayed...the Blountville shelter has set up web pages for half a dozen, with several pairs of sisters and several single cats to choose from.

Silver has not been spayed. I think Silver needs not to be spayed. She has clearly inherited the gene for the Seralini Effect from her mother. She has given birth to very few kittens,  in her lifetime, and only one of her kittens has survived, but unsuccessful pregnancies are her body's way of flushing out glyphosate and keeping her healthy through these years when we've all been regularly poisoned by glyphosate vapors. Spaying Silver before glyphosate is banned just might kill her in a year or two. I don't know that that's what happened to Crayola, but I know what Crayola's immediate family have been living with. 

Trumpkin's humans undoubtedly don't want to go through the drama of living with a cat who's surviving glyphosate poisoning thanks to the Seralini Effect, so they should get a cat who is already spayed, no kittens, no drama, and just take their chances on that cat surviving until we get the ban we all really need.

I am more concerned about Silver, and about poor lonely Trumpkin, and about the shelter cats who so need to be spoiled, than I am about the snow. Or about the virus, which I think I've whipped by now. I am actually feeling full of energy, looking forward to walking in fresh snow tonight.

Bad Poetry: The Adventure That Did Not Happen

In another life I'd married one who always loved the land,
And we went to see the damage done by southern weather's hand,
And we towed a trailer rattling with tools of construction work
In a caravan of other people who thought shame to shirk,
And we did for damaged houses all that one clear week could do,
And were home again for parties others had looked forward to.

In real life he's dead, and people said, "If some are still in tents
The chances are that drink and drugs have eaten up their rents,
And in any case our shopping's done, and all our money's spent;
Let us settle down to celebrating, as God clearly meant."

And they may be right. They spent their money where it did some good.
Let them light their Christmas fires; there is plenty of dead wood.
And the worst thing about living in this grand historic State
Is that folks in the adjacent states think that we think we're "so great."
And nobody else but me has kinfolk living to our south,
And mine are farther east than that, so I will shut my mouth.
The shoe was on the other foot some forty years ago.
It may not be again for forty more, for all I know.

Ode to the Long Awaited November Rain

In a land of endless summer

smoke and dust make brazen air

like a greenhouse glass; a bummer

if we live or sojourn there.

So returning to the moody

places where four seasons roll

and November's bleak and broody

is refreshing to the soul.

Though the air's a long time cleaning,

in the end the scent of rain

gathers to itself the meaning

of refreshment for the brain.

Hail the bleakness of November

onto which we can project

all things tedious to remember

(even those that we elect),

stash provisions in a bunker,

break out quilts and rocking chairs,

gather with our cronies, hunker

round the fire like sleepy bears,

until positively freezing

wind blows in to dissipate

mists of all that's been unpleasing,

and we eagerly await

ice and snow and all December's

round of primal winter-bliss;

sing and dance around the embers,

light the next fire's logs from this.

We can do without November,

some say. Do they say amiss?

Frostless, colorless September

said to us, this year: Remember

winter's own peculiar bliss. 

This poem was suggested by Rosemary Nissen-Wade, who lives where November is a spring month:

https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2024/11/friday-writings-153-my-cup-runneth-over.html

Belated Book Review: Searching for Redemption

Title: Searching for Redemption

Authors: Misty Zaugg, Stephanie Mylchreest, Mike Kraus

Date: 2021

Publisher: Muonic

Quote: "Alpha was the storm's name."

It's climate fiction: If "global warming" really did generate deadlier storms, buckle down for a pair that make Katrina and Rita look tame. In this hypothetical storm season, the human names for the year have been used up, the Weather Service have reverted to calling hurricanes by letters in the Greek alphabet, and Alpha and Beta are bearing down on a set of people who have different attitudes toward hurricanes.

It's vividly written. After a sunny day, under a clear sky, waiting for the moon to rise, after reading this novella I'm braced for the next flash of lightning, asking myself why I'm out here with the laptop . Well, this is Virginia. Killer storms ravage Florida and Mississippi every year; we get rain. But the details of the fictional hurricane almost make me forget that tonight, for once, we're not getting even rain. This story--the novella opens a series--is not for anyone prone to hypertension.

Its intended audience is probably preppers...the sensible kind, like the family in the book, who are preparing to survive the kind of crisis situations they've survived before, like storms and power outages. In the story we watch Alpha and Beta smash into the weak points of each human's storm preparation plan. 

Dave, Brittany, and Lilly are storm chasers, the girls delightedly tagging along with their serious scientist father and enjoying their mother's worries. 

Rayleigh and Avril are homeless drug addicts. Rayleigh's too rebellious and Avril's too scared to leave a private women's shelter for a bigger public shelter in another town. They find a smashed-up liquor store, get some expensive liquor, and start drinking, but those storms just won't let them pass out in peace. The phrase "searching for redemption" is part of Rayleigh's thought processes.

Michael and Danielle are preppers with a beautifully planned and stocked storm shelter under their house...until their house falls in on top of it. 

This story will go on, though lots of sympathetic characters will die. 

If you can stand a "thriller" that reminds you of weak points to shore up in your storm preparation plan,..and of the possibility that, if "Category 6" hurricanes with winds over 200 miles an hour came to exist, something would break down anyway...then this is the series for you.

Bill Busting 103: Cheap Cooling

No cheap method of cooling is as reliable as expensive, unsustainable air-conditioning. If you need to control the climate for your electronic devices...

...you're not living as frugally as you might be. If you need to save serious amounts of money, you don't plug in electronic devices. There are good reasons to maintain a Net-free home anyway, and you would never have believed how much cooler an office is when you do the math in your head, with a pencil, and the writing on a manual typewriter.

(Actually, when Frank B. Gilbreth proclaimed the death of the traditional pencil, as in those good ol' school-bus-yellow Ticonderogas, he was advertising the so-called mechanical pencil, which really was superior. Mechanical pencils replace the wasted wood around the graphite stick with a more durable metal shaft you can refill with plain graphite sticks. Mechanical pencils can be considered both Green and an upgrade, if you have a convenient source of plain "leads" to refill them.)

The other frugal way to reduce cooling cost is to get out of the city. If you're not employed in a city full-time, see if you can telecommute from a small town or even a farm. Look up the towns from which people are posting comments on the Internet like "What population problem?" There are reasons why those towns are not crowded, but local warming effects from too much pavement, too many cars, too many air conditioners, too many TVs, and too many computers, are not among them. Some places really are underpopulated because, the last time realtors tried to market properties there in US cities, the concern on people's mind was how much wheat they could raise on their land. If you don't want to raise wheat, you might actually like living in a place where wheat did not grow well. In theory all you'd need to do would be to keep those places leafy and sparsely populated...many of them have only very short hot seasons. In practice, you'd want to be sure your home in Saskatchewan was cheap and efficient to heat.

Seriously, people survived summers in muggy Mississippi before air conditioning was invented. They even survived without being able to store ice. 

The secret: Even when sweat is not evaporating efficiently enough that you feel the cooling effect, air blowing over wet skin reduces the temperature enough to prevent heat damage, most of the time. 

1. Your own home may already be clothing-optional. This is a good way to reduce cooling costs since it also reduces laundry expenses. When you need to wear clothes, your options are cotton, linen, and hemp. Linen and hemp become comfortable to wear when they've been aged to the very brink of natural decomposition, but you can spend the winter getting them there. In addition to reducing the extent of human suffering from heat, keeping the plastic off our skins reduces the inconvenience and discomfort many people endure from fungus infections. 

2. Don't fear sweat. Sweat does need to be washed out of clothes before bacteria get into them and start fermenting. That Sick Green laundry-hamper aroma comes from bacteria that can put a drain on the human immune system. However, when people maintain a good healthy interpersonal distance, fresh sweat doesn't smell bad. At a healthy distance most people don't notice it, and those who do continually tell pollsters that fresh sweat is, if anything, an attractive odor. So let your body cool itself. (If you like the way underarm deodorants interact with your personal fragrance, they're cheap enough, but avoid the "antiperspirant" kind--they can be toxic.)

3. Use water liberally. Keep cool water in a foot bath under the desk. Apply cool water to your wrists, face, and scalp as needed. On very hot days, you might want to wear wet clothes. (Cushions and upholstery need to be replaced, if they can't be laundered, every year or two anyway.)

4. Eat lightly in hot weather. Nibble on small amounts of cool, juicy things like fruit and raw green leaves. Toward the goal of reducing malnutrition we all learned in primary school to construct menus that included foods from every nutritional group at every meal. Actually it turns out that, as a daily rule, that means more protein than the human body needs. If you consumed meat, milk, fish, eggs, cheese, or even mixtures of a grain and a legume, every day all winter, you can safely live on raw fruit and vegetables through a summer heat wave. Of course, a little grilling is part of the summer tradition, but it's easiest to stay cool if you light the fire around sundown, when mosquitoes start to fly. 

5. Drink lots of water in hot weather. Dehydration is more of a threat than heat itself. 

6. Adjust your behavior to the weather. Get up early and do physical work while the heat and humidity are relatively low. Sit down with a cool drink and a fan during the heat of the day. 

7. Wear closed-toe shoes or boots while working with heavy machinery or large animals, since they reduce the risk of breaking or amputating toes. Don't wear the same shoes or boots in the house. Change footwear at the door. Avoid reusing a pair of socks unless they've been laundered and dried between wearings--always put on fresh dry ones. 

8. If you're in the habit of using a computer or cell phone, and you're not being paid to do that, break the habit. Write down a list of what you want to do with those devices in between trips to a public-access computer center in town. While there, don't waste time surfing. Get your news from printed papers. Public libraries often keep a selection of newspapers available. Neighbors often agree to leave the newspapers they buy at a cafe, too, to reduce the number of subscriptions anyone needs to pay for.

9. Use a fan. When just waving a hand-held fan around your face is not enough, you may feel that it's worth the expense to run an electric fan. Another alternative is to rig up a device that activates a fan when you move your feet or rock a rocking chair. Another tradition, which may add enough general entertainment value to offset its inefficiency, is to spend hot afternoons with a friend and take turns fanning each other. (Actually, the desire to make the other person do all the fanning may account for the origin of slavery, but that's now illegal in all but a few...very hot...countries.)

10. Maintain a clean environment. Don't "just learn to live with" the odor of fungi or bacteria that thrive in a warm, damp environment. They cause "summer colds" and "allergies." Kill the fungi and bacteria before they attack humans. Oldfashioned "natural" cleaning agents like baking soda, borax, lemon, alcohol, and vinegar will eliminate most odors. I've been known to escalate to bleach and Listerine. No aerosol spray is necessary, or even very helpful, in eliminating odor-causing fungi and bacteria. Scrubbing solid surfaces, and sloshing porous substances through moving water, are good hot-weather exercise and very frugal ways to eliminate pathogens from the house.

Top Ten Things Book Reviewers Do on Stormy Days

This week's Long & Short Reviews question asked what book reviewers do on stormy days. Here are a few of our favorite things:

1. Read

Duh! If there's any light in the house, it's probably shining on some sort of page. As I get back to work I've been applying myself to Booktober Blitz books: two chapters, two web pages or one offline task, all day. I'm still behind where I wanted to be, but no worries, writers, your books WILL be reviewed. Though I've lost track of any ideal review dates.

2. Cook

If only a pot of tea, a solid majority of respondents said they like to prepare something hot to eat or drink during s storm. (I'm in the minority here. Where I live, you don't want to be using electricity during a storm, and the weather's probably not ideal for lighting a fire even in a wood stove, either.)

3. Go Out In It

This depends on where people are and what kind of storms they get. The standard snowstorms along the Atlantic coast are fun  The air's not all THAT cold, so you just put on some of that heavy knitwear your Auntie Pris so enjoys knitting, to ensure that the snow forms a layer of insulation on your head and shoulders instead of melting down your neck, and you actually find yourself coming in because you feel too warm out in the snow, admiring the snowscapes and catching snowflakes on your tongue. (Our snowflakes are sour and bitter, and sting a bit, for the first six hours or so due to air pollution. They gradually become less nasty if snow keeps falling. "Snow ice cream" has a distinct flavor some companies have tried to copy...the taste of environmental degradation.) 

Being out in a real blizzard, or an electrical storm, is much more dangerous and is not recommended by this web site. 

4. Watch It Happen

Well, why not--especially if the electricity goes out and there's nothing else to do while the storm rages.

5. Do Our Crafts

Knitting, sewing, crocheting, whatever...it's cozy during a storm, and always there to fall back on when light may be poor and computers can't be plugged in.

6. Rest, Snuggle Up, Go to Bed

For people who don't otherwise take naps during the day, a storm can be a wonderful excuse to spend time snugglng up...with a book, or the kids, or the animals, or whatever other configuration may come to mind. 

7. Watch Movies

Two respondents apparently have reliable enough electricity, or durable enough batteries, to mention watching movies as a favorite thing to do during storms. I can't even imagine.

8. Exercise Indoors

Storms can feel energizing. If they're not the kind we enjoy being out in, they might inspire us to work out or dance around the house.

9. Play Games

Board games, card games, and puzzle games were specifically mentioned. Great during a power outage.

10. Write

Slackers that we are...or maybe it's just that we tend to write online these days...only one respondent mentioned writing as a favorite thing to do during a storm. That wasn't my answer, either.

And nobody (but me) mentioned clean-up, probably because that starts after the storm stops. However, repairing the damage the storm did is the responsible adult excuse for being Out In It ("it" especially meaning the fresh clean snow). And roaring around on a snowmobile, if you own or can borrow one. And rolling snowballs--huge ones, if enough snow fell. 

It's not exactly a favorite thing to do, but something I often do, during a storm, is sit around gloomily adding up the minimal cost of repairing the damage the storm's done. Anticipating the clean-up is the part of that that is fun.

It is a lot more fun to be a child, during a storm, than it is to be the grown-up. Between ages 17 and 30 I enjoyed preparing to be the grown-up. Between 30 and 45 I at least had people to share the burden of being the grown-up, so it wasn't too bad. Then I reached the unenviable position of the only grown-up and have been unable to get out of it since. It is hard for the only grown-up in the house to enjoy storms as much as they deserve to be enjoyed.

Status Update: Blog Returns to Life

Happy New Year, Gentle Readers! I hope you've all been enjoying all of the holidays.

The good news is that the computer's connecting to the Internet from that private connection again; I'm not in McDonald's today. That's very good news, because the walk back from McDonald's felt much more tiring than it ought to have felt; I may be fighting the flu, or a cold or COVID or some such tiresome little thing. 

It wasn't all that cold last night. At the weather station the temperature was above freezing while I was walking back from McDonald's. In Gate City I could feel the ground freezing under my feet as I walked briskly into the wind, overcoat open because it had to cover the laptop computer slung over my shoulder. Near the shopping plaza it was slushy; before I reached the bridge it was icy. Along the way, people could see that something was moving along the side of the road--they swung over into the fast lane to dodge whatever-it-was--but through the falling rain and snow what they saw undoubtedly looked more like Quasimodo than like a harmless old lady, so it was hard to blame them for driving around me as fast as they could instead of sharing their cars. I have walked farther in worse weather. My resistance has been lowered by glyphosate and other chemical poisoning earlier this week. I'm still losing blood.

The bad news is of course that the cyberchores have kept piling up through the holidays. 

Book reviews that should have gone live during December will be popping up, a few hours apart, until I've caught up. Links and regular non-book posts will resume after the book reviews are done. Short reviews and star points should start appearing on the public book sites (Goodreads, Library Thing, etc.) by Monday if not before.

I've wondered whether this disconnection was some sort of cosmic message about the blog's observation of Christmas this year...but then someone did hand me a lovely Christmas post, so among the first regular posts to go live will be one about a new Christmas "tradition" I had the opportunity to observe in Kingsport this year.

Now, back to the books and book reviews...December's Best Cozy Mysteries were not Christmas-themed so they'll appear after the Christmas-themed books. 

Bad Poetry: Adjectives for Autumn

This one should have gone live on Friday, and didn't, because I was distracted by fair weather and new e-books.

For narrative writing, we're often advised to cut out adjectives and use livelier verbs. For poetry, this week's Poets & Storytellers United prompt was an invitation to use all those adjectives...I remember that in many languages an adjective is just another form of a verb. This poem, however, uses a bare minimum of verbs.

We've just had record high temperatures in what some call "Indian summer," some "St Martin's little summer." Very little is known about this St Martin. Some doubt whether he really existed. He was a favorite saint in old England, though, because he was associated with those last warm sunny days of autumn. His name was adopted by other saints (who definitely did exist) and by several distinguished men who weren't even Catholic. I like "little summer" as a name for this weather pattern. The weather is far too pleasant, when it comes, to be wasted on quibbling about the meaning of the word "saint" and the most correct attitude to take toward the legend of St Martin.

1. Green and Yellow

Cooler, yes, but not much. Thinner sun 

beams slant true west, earlier each afternoon.

Relief. Could be more. Summer's job is done,

Surely? Mozzies whne; same old tune.

Walnut and poplar leaves turn yellow.

Weather's still summer, only more mellow.

2. Red

Red maple. Purple dogwood. Red, pink, white

Flybush. Pink lady's thumb. White oaks brown

But coppery. Scarlet oaks red. Black oaks bright

Orange-red. Frosty nights; daytime highs down.

Afternoon sun, west-south-west. Persimmons blue

Undertone through the orange; white oaks, too.

3. Orange

Most trees bare now. First freezing night leaves frost

In thin southwestern sun all afternoon.

Beech leaves, orange and stubborn, never lost

Till spring. Orange haze on yellow hunter's moon.

All oak leaves shade through orange to brown

Before, or after, they come down.

 

4. Drab

Warm again. Not for long. Bare, dormant trees.

Twigs down along with leaves, all fading fast.

Nuts ripe, in last thaw after the first freeze.

All's waiting for the year's next freezing blast.

Alles ist hin. All gone. Leaves to be found,

Except some oaks and beeches, on the ground.

Bad Poetry: Invocation to Petrichor

This is actually Thursday's post. It's going live on Wednesday so it can be shared with the site that prompted it: 

https://dversepoets.com/2023/07/11/poetics-one-word/

In the ancient world ichor meant the vital fluid that flowed through non-human veins. Petr- meant "of a rock or stone." From these word we get "petrichor" as the word for that lovely smell of approaching rain in hot weather. It's more like the sweat of stones than like blood or haemolymph, but whatever. 

This determinedly light verse was written amidst serious prayers for people in the Southwestern States, going into a fourth week of terrible heat, hearing their heat wave exploited by those who stand to profit from one "global warming" theory or another, while the Eastern States set records for a cool, damp summer. This may not actually be the most deadly hot summer the Southwest has survived, but it does seem to be the most brutally unfair hot summer. 

I'm looking at 62 degrees Fahrenheit, clear, less humid after a full day of sunshine with afternoon highs just above 80 for just a few hours. Another record low temperature tonight, Microsoft volunteers through the temperature button on the laptop. This is not July weather. This is late May, early June, or maybe late August weather. I'm asking Google how the weather's been in California, Mexico, Texas, where some of my e-friends are. No relief seems to be in sight for most of them. This week Mexico's looking at 40 to 45 degrees Celsius every afternoon with "cooling" nights as low as 35 degrees Celsius. Mas que soporta el cuerpo. Gentle Readers, I'd send you some of this weather if I could. Since the technology to do that has not been invented yet, please feel free to come East and soak up this record cool weather.

Petrichor, honey of the rock,

Evanescent as wind, forerunner of rain,

The hot lands call you now! Petrichor, Petrichor,

Return once more, whisper o'er

Inland from ocean shore, where parching pore

Cracks ground, cracks lips.

Heat's harsh enough. Exploitation drives blood pressure

Over the Top. Come again, Petrichor,

Rain once more, blow before rain, healing rain! 

How I Stay Cool During a Heat Wave

Whew. Long and Short Reviews did not anticipate, when they picked this topic for the first week of July, how bitterly ironic it would be.

At the time of writing some places are going into the third week with afternoon temperatures frequently exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit and overnight lows still warmer than most people really like.

At the time of writing my part of the United States seems to have got hold of most of the continent's supply of cool breezes and rain showers, and to be sitting on it.

Some of us had berries and cherries this year. The cool damp spring put plenty of berries and cherries in the orchard. In recent summers I've gone through the orchard picking a berry and eating it, picking a berry and eating it. This summer actually felt like picking raspberries again--they grow in clusters of six, and you pick them faster than you can eat them and take in more than you want to eat, what a concept. I picked the black raspberries on the sunny bank, which always ripen first; they weren't sweet enough to sell but they made two good meals.  What about the red and yellow raspberries, the wineberries, the blueberries, and the cherries? Every time I even thought about going up to check on them, it rained. The rain might have been saving me from myself. The orchard was sprayed with glyphosate, in the middle of the night, last year.

But nobody gets a satisfactory crop every year, and at least we didn't have a deadly heat wave. We're still revelling in 80-degree afternoons and 60-degree nights. 

If you readers believe you can't take another week of the heat wave, by all means come to the Blue Ridge Mountains. We don't have much to offer but cool green shade, but we have that. 

Now about heat waves...I remember 1980. We had hot days here, but not deadly hot days. Some more record heat waves occurred later in the 1980s. I remember especially the heat wave in July 1987, when I was renting a room that had one south-facing window and one west-facing window, had no air conditioners and no window screens (that was the cicada year), and was painted yellow. It seemed as if the thermometer just got stuck somewhere between 95 and 105 and wouldn't go down.

What did I do? What everyone in Washington does, of course. The question is, beach or mountains? In 1987 I was offered a free ride to the beach. I made the following scientific discovery: The skinny black mosquitoes that are native to the Eastern States, inland, will not bite me if they can find any other source of warm blood. The sturdy, yellow, hairy saltmarsh mosquitoes on Assateague Island, however, do not care. They eat tourists and all tourists are alike to them. The way to enjoy the island is to stay in the water. It is possible to have both Sunday School and church services with everyone standing waist-deep in the water. 

It is useless to bring anything that saltwater would hurt to the Eastern Shore in July. Socks, for instance. You wear boat shoes, little light leather shoes. As a result of being constantly soaked in salt water these shoes fit your feet perfectly and you won't need socks in winter, either, until it's time to break out the boots. There are cheaper alternatives to Sperry Topsiders that work just fine, but really cheap alternatives made of synthetic materials can ruin a trip to the beach.

Despite the Capital City's ancient tradition of dispersing among the beaches and the mountains during July and August,  however, there are days when one is stuck in the city on a Code Red day. In the 1980s we all had very relaxed work ethics. If the thought of walking briskly to Metrorail makes your head swim, call in sick--it's not a lie. You are young and strong, and the feeling produced by thinking about walking a mile on a 95-degree morning is as sick as you are likely to be all year.

You might have air conditioning. Green ideals be...You will lie on the floor in front of the air conditioner, wailing about the heat. You will take a lot of showers and drink a lot of tall glasses in which a small amount of liquid is poured over as many ice cubes as possible. In a typical Takoma Park house of six or eight people, the shower and the ice maker or freezer will be running more or less constantly. Try to avoid breaches of the peace like wasting water to wash mere clothes or dishes. 

If you think of it in time you can, however, wash everything everyone who really wants to work on a Code Red day intends to wear to work. As soon as the wet things come out of the washer, everyone puts them on and heads for Metrorail. Speaking of "heads," it will be useful if everybody has soaked theirs thoroughly in cold water before leaving the house. On reaching Metrorail, stand in front of the large ominous-looking pylon that houses an air conditioner. Drink in the odor of Stachybotrys mold. Say "Ahhh."

In the 1980s Metrorail was actually a pleasant place to be on a Code Red day, although this changed, inevitably, over the years. The combination of regular rail, elevated rail, and subway rail on the same routes means that Metrorail tracks and tunnels strikingly resemble a "thrilling tunnels" roller coaster ride. When the trains weren't crowded and the air conditioning worked, there was much to be said for riding Metro as a way to beat the heat. Libraries, museums, and art galleries also tend to have good air conditioning and little crowding. 

Anyway you are making real grown-up money for not doing much of anything, certainly nothing that could be called work in the sense that chemistry class was work. You might as well find your favorite tiny-niche-market shops. The Montgomery Mall on the outer edge of Bethesda used to be a cool, quiet place to shop. 

If your sick day must be spent in a room with a south window and a west window, in a house with no air conditioning, you might consider going to work after all. If you really are anemic, however, and have a stack of papers awaiting your attention at home already, get a cheap plastic "dish pan." Fill it with two or three inches of water. Slide it under your desk. Take a cold shower, fling a thick cheap cotton bathrobe over the chair, and see how much work you can get done before you dry out and start to perspire. Repeat as necessary. 

The human body requires very few proteins, fats, and carbohydrates to survive a heat wave. In fact, less of those consumed may be more actually digested. Food for Code Red days is mainly fibre and water, and should be eaten directly from the refrigerator. Watermelon actually contains a super balance of nutrients for surviving a heat wave. If you really want a slice of cold meat, cut one for dessert after finishing your watermelon. \

Heat wave meals can, of course, be more creative than just one melon after another. Forever vivid in my memory will be the week the store ran a big sale on little limes, and I created a lime jello mold confection consisting of lime jello and chopped limes. I thought it tasted pretty good, which was fortunate, because I think I was the only one who actually ate it.

In addition to the melon and citrus families we also have mangoes, pineapples, strawberries, and cherries. For protein and complex carbs we can add an occasional coconut. When all this sweetness gets boring it can be varied with lettuce, tomato, onion, and cucumber. The doctor I consulted in the 1980s, who was from Kenya, used to like an ear of corn, raw, straight from the refrigerator, but I never acquired that taste myself./

A Code Red day is a day to unplug everything  but the essentials--freezer, refrigerator, ice maker, air conditioner, fans. Unplug all electronics--they might catch fire. Unplug the microwave oven in between actual uses. Unplug any appliances you can unplug. Throw the circuit on an electric water heater, if you have one--you want cold showers anyway. If the tank is placed in front of a southwest window, during the heat wave the water heater will deliver enough hot water for shaving and shampooing. Whether you can stand to unplug the toilet during a heat wave depends on you--the heat will dry and char everything faster, but running a dry-flush toilet on solar power alone does take extra peat. 

Those permanent, big, cement-lined swimming pools everybody thinks they have to have in California? They're extravagant and not very Green, but if you have virtuously not installed one, try to think of some virtuous way to be nice to somebody who has one. 

How seriously do I take these ideas now? Meh. I now live in the mountains. Some days it does get hot enough up here that I unplug my Internet-free computer. 

Meanwhile it's actually fun to remember how I stayed cool during the heat waves that hit Washington when I was there. Ocean City, Assateague, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ocracoke, Clarksville, and many were the times my husband and I escaped the heat by coming to where I live now. You can't take everyone in the city out with you but at least you can remove your warm body from the city.

Weird Weather

Last year, during a summer that was mild but well within our normal range, someone who'd been listening to too much commercial television asked me if I'd ev-ah seen such weather. "Of course," I said, reminding the person of years. Person obviously thought I was no fun. 

But this year's weather has been weird. 

First we hardly had any winter weather at all. No hard freezes, only one sprinkling of snow. New York State seemed to have grabbed all the cold weather and sat on it. I didn't even need to dig out the serious blanket-and-quiltage this winter. I ran a 300-watt room heater, and frequently turned it off, while sleeping under one sheet, one cotton blanket, and sometimes my knitted shawl. I took some more blankets out for airing but did not actually put them on the bed. From November to March the weather was chilly, but not what even Virginians can call cold with a straight face. 

Then the mildly chilly weather just stayed and stayed through the coolest spring anyone can remember. Day after day the outdoor temperatures have been perfect for me, no real need for heating or cooling, days in the 55-to-80-degrees-Fahrenheit range and overnight lows in the 45-to-65-degrees range. Anyone who's mildly hyperthyroid will agree that if the weather were going to be the same every day for the rest of our lives, this is the way it should be. People taking blood pressure medication are actually complaining about the lack of sweaty, steamy afternoons in between the mildly warm, sunny ones and the windy, rainy, chilly ones. Our June weather report contains several record lows for the time of year.

It's been sort of unreal to read or hear the news from the rest of the world...Hot and dry enough for serious wildfires, in Nova Scotia, in spring? Who knew that was possible? Now e-friends on the West Coast are having normal weather, New York is basking in flowers and sunshine, I'm revelling in the sort of cool June we don't get nearly often enough to suit me, and Texas is scorching in day after day of afternoon highs well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Life is not fair. Weather is not fair. I didn't even want to post about this until the Weather Service assured us that it's due to change. Texas is supposed to see some sort of break, with no mention of tornados or hurricanes yet, this afternoon. Virginia is supposed to get the ninety-degree afternoons our cardiovascular patients have been pining for, too.

We have had years of weird weather before. Not exactly this pattern of weird weather, but others. They did not add up to anybody's predictions of "global climate change," for hotter or for colder. They were anomalies, after which regression toward the mean was observed. One or sometimes two years of really unusual weather are normally followed by several years of really normal, ordinary weather. 

Early in the literature of almost every culture on Earth, as written language developed, there appears a legend of an epic weather disaster that seemed to destroy the whole Earth while only Our Ancestors, the Chosen People, escaped. In cultures that existed longer as cohesive cultures before written language developed, the legends tell of more than one disaster. In cultures that have had written language longer, multiple disasters are described in more precise, meaning narrower, terms: In Grandpa's time there were great and terrible droughts, and in his grandfather's time there were great and terrible floods, that destroyed whole towns but not the whole Earth. 

Virginia's epic hurricane, which occurred after the Weather Service started giving hurricanes cutesy-wutesy human names and was called Camille, became a legend people told their grandchildren. By several measures of awfulness, Camille wasn't even much of a hurricane; it just happened further north and further inland than a normal hurricane, where people had never seen a hurricane before and weren't prepared. Camille did a lot of damage but not nearly so much as Katrina, which hit a place where hurricanes were not a complete novelty, but where denser population and more expensive buildings made Katrina, at the very least, ten times as expensive as Camille. But for those who want to compare the awfulness of recent weather disasters, someone Out There calculated that the Johnstown Flood, which destroyed towns in New York and Pennsylvania and was still remembered and talked about a hundred years later, did more damage to more people's property than Katrina did. Hurricane Camille deserves to be remembered as a story about what happens when people don't prepare for the unusual. Hurricane Katrina deserves to be remembered as a story about what happens when everyone expects someone else--especially government!--to take care of things. The Johnstown Flood, which occurred after one storm broke a few large dams, approaches the scale of the weather legends preserved by people who had no means of precise calculation and long-distance communication, when fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc., appeared to be destroying the whole Earth--at least as much of it as anyone knew anything about, anyway.

Most of the people I know are what our ancestors would have called old, as in grandparents, and have seen a lot of unusual weather, a few disasters. We learned that the word tsunami was more accurate than the older word, "tidal wave," but during the winter before Hurricane Katrina people were still talking about The Tsunami that washed away whole towns in a few South Pacific countries. There were a few other hurricanes with human names that did a lot of damage; Agnes, Hugo, Ivan. During the short lifespan of this web site we saw North Carolina, where one foot of snow can be considered a disaster, buried in six feet of snow. Not too long ago we saw old Grandmother Pele, the fire spirit, redesigning Hawaii again. Alaskan baby-boomers and their elders remember "The" earthquake of 1964. Some African baby-boomers remember temperatures officially recorded as peaking at 131 degrees Fahrenheit, measured properly in the shade, but they weren't in the shade and they saw thermometers reading 140 degrees or more. In the Blue Ridge Mountains the summer of 1980 was pleasant, but continent-wide the 1980 heat wave has been blamed for more fatalities than any recent hurricane or tornado. So we've seen fire, and we've seen rain; we've seen things that don't happen in every decade, or century. 

We have, of course, seen different ones than our grandparents did. Nobody I know has personal memories of the snow on the fourth of July in 1920, but our grandparents had. The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1901 rates in between the Johnstown Flood and Hurricane Katrina on the scale of property damage done by a single storm. The 1930s recorded some of the worst heat waves in US history, and one of the coldest, snowiest winters. Then there was 1816, remembered as the Year Without a Summer, and 1780, the year of the Dark Day--weather phenomena so memorable that major churches still point to them as the fulfillments of prophecies of the end of the world. (By now, how closely events of 1780 foretold the end of the world is a good question.) 

On the scale of weather events, a mild summer, followed by an abnormally mild winter, followed by a positively chilly spring, is pretty tidgy. 

It is not proof of "global warming" or the impending loss of most of the continent due to rising sea level.

It is not proof of "global cooling" or the impending ice age in which all but the tropical countries are doomed to become uninhabitable.

It is not proof that global climate change may not take place, however much it counters the claim that global climate change is taking place fast enough to be seen now. 

It is proof that, once again, we're living through memorable weather. In thinking about global climate change, yearly weather quirks are irrelevant.

So is the local climate change that really is "warming" our cities and costing us a few lives, mostly of older people with cardiovascular disease, every summer. Actual weather patterns, movements of hotter and colder air driven by wind, aggravate the local warming or "greenhouse" effect in some places, some summers, and mitigate it in others. That's why, if you ask Google how many heat-related deaths the United States has seen within our lifetime, Google will direct you straight to epa.gov, where you'll see a spiky chart with its all-time high point in 1980. 

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-related-deaths

Apart from the 1980 heat wave--and seriously, I was keeping a diary in 1980, there were lots of days when my brother and I took extra cold showers, just to cool off, and lolled in front of the window fan until ordered to get up and do something useful, but in the Blue Ridge Mountains there were no Code Red days in 1980--the chart of heat-related fatalities jitters up and down like an EKG, but the general trend is upward. To some extent that's because interest in the "global warming" narrative has driven some hospitals to count more cases as "heat-related" since 2000 than they did before 2000. In fact a new line has been added to the chart to show the looser criteria for counting deaths as "heat-influenced" since 2000; the summer of 2000 was brutal in many places, the heat-related death count for 2000 was higher than for any other year since 1980, and increased fear of Code Red heat has actually contributed to the local warming effect as more people have cranked up the air conditioning. But the bottom line is that extreme temperatures kill people, and local warming is increasing the frequency of heat-related fatalities. 

What to do? Turn off the air conditioners, for pity's sake, and park the cars. Get out. But stay near water and shade. Maintain green space and healthy interpersonal distance. Consider replacing heat-trapping paved roads with shell or gravel surfaces. Recognize that living more than fifteen feet above or below ground level is like prostitution--there's no way to stop some people indulging in it, but it should be a crime for anyone else to make a profit by exploiting those people--and that, while it might arguably be possible to pack more people into a few "ghost towns" out West, the population of the Eastern States is unsustainably dense already and needs everything we can ethically do to thin it down. 

Mild though the summer's been, on a sunny afternoon a town ten miles from mine is starting to show downtown temperatures fifteen degrees hotter than my home. The difference will be twenty degrees or more when the sun really starts beating down on us in July. The official temperature, measured in the shade at the weather station, used to run three degrees warmer than the temperature here, and still runs less than ten degrees warmer. The temperature on the streets, where the new stock of drug addicts imported from Knoxville lie on the pavement waiting to die, and the desperate working mothers try not to sweat through their clothes so they can keep their jobs, and the factory laborers, oh mercy, at least they're all young...So far it's only been in the nineties, in this record-"cold" June.

I don't think of myself as making sacrifices to minimize my contribution to the local warming of Kingsport, Tennessee. I don't live there; I have never, least of all when I did live there, wanted to live there. I don't drive; I wanted to learn how to drive, in case of emergencies, and in the learning process I soon realized that emergencies are the only situations in which I want to drive. I work close to home, and do what commuting I do on foot; I've wanted to do that all my life. I take extra cold baths and use a window fan, not an air conditioner. There's never been a television set in my home. I cut up food with a knife and stir them together with a spoon, not an electrical device. I minimize cooking in summer (baked goods, slow-grilled meat, and slow-simmered soup are winter treats), and do most of it outdoors. My taste always has been to listen to and participate in live, acoustic music, unamplified. My parents chose to set up the water heater and toilet so that they work efficiently enough for one person on solar power alone. Running all electrical devices entirely on solar power is still something I'm working on; all-solar lighting is within sight. When you get accustomed to living lightly on the land, Gentle Readers, it feels natural and pleasant, and you wouldn't want to live in an overcrowded, overheated city and waste energy heating up the "greenhouse." I certainly don't.