Skip to main content

When it rains in the desert, the fires of Hell go out (temporarily).

It is raining hard enough to put out the fires of Hell.
It will not put out the fires of Hell because then there would be no desert here.
But we have been watching a small frog trying to climb our fence
because he (or she) is convinced that there shall soon be
forty days and forty nights of rain, followed by an Ark with things that eat frogs.

Our backyard is sloped rather markedly.
The former owner of the house made stone-lined causeways
where the water was going to run, anyway, and they not only filled:  they disappeared!
I painted a patio-table base, designed to hold a ceramic pot to be covered
with a glass top, and the pot is half-full of water.

The Sonoran Desert, not to be trifled with when the sun is shining,
is one of the wettest deserts on the continent, usually getting from 3 to 16 inches
of rain a year, and this is one of the years when nature is catching up.

We can see the intersection of El Camino de Oeste and . . .  Whoops!

A bolt of lightning just flashed, and Mari just said something they rhymed
with "Ole's hip", but I suspect that is just an announcement that the end is near.
If things get any worse, Annie, our cat, will soon quit eating and get religion,
and Mari will be off with Jesus on her way to the Holy Land (Iowa),
and I will be left here all alone with traces on the hillside showing that once
there was a flash flood that washed away my cat, my wife, and my pickup.

That reminds me of something Dale Johnson used to ask us:
"Do you know what happens when you play a Country and Western
record backwards?  You get your pickup back, you get your gun back,
you get your job back, your wife back. . . ."

Things will work out.  Hell will return, and Jesus won't come.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more