It's hot and there is the smell of smoke in the air from fires much further northeast. For us, heat and drought send up shivers of fear. It's around this time of year we remember the firestorm, and two years ago fierce fires that caused us to evacuate our cabin. It's also the time of the big earthquake and one from along time ago when I lived in Santa Rosa. So we talk about the weather, but really we're jumpy because we've done the wet towels under the doors thing, the packing up the pets and papers thing, the praying thing. Nobody speaks directly of this fearsome time of year, when the weather is at it's most beautiful, like a trick of the mind. We joke about the weather getting summery as soon as school begins, the plants and trees attempting to stand up to the parched earth, but it's not really funny.
I guess people joke when confronted by something so much bigger than themselves that their powerlessness looks a might ridiculous. Yes, we're conserving water and letting lawns dry out, but really, the whim of lightening, the spark deep in the forest is beyond our ability to control. We're watchers. We watch what nature chooses to do. Helplessly.
So does naming the fear have any power? If we are preventative it may, as we stock up on water and supplies, figure out an exit route, meet in our block groups to designate the first aid house and the house with the generator. But a fire could sweep right to the bay, and none of us would get away in the smash of traffic that would be solidifying the roads. We know that. We feel it. It's really unnameable.
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