Tuesday
For weeks now, we here in Tennessee and other parts of the American south have been gripped by what they’re calling a “flash drought.” Abnormally high temperatures and lack of any precipitation have been “cracking farm soil, drying up ponds and raising the risk of wildfires.” We’re far from the worst extreme weather event experienced in the U.S. this year–hurricanes, flooding, and California fires hold that dubious honor–but one fire could have had us resembling the disastrous fires that devastated the Smokies in 2016.
Thankfully, relief came Saturday night and again all day yesterday as rain finally arrived. I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner when salvation finally arrives.
By shooting the albatross, the mariner triggers a drought that eventually kills all of his shipmates:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink….
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
After the Mariner repents, however, he experiences a moment of grace. For the first time in days, he is able to sleep, and this sleep is followed by a refreshing shower. Yesterday’s rain felt like something like this:
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light—almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.
Things looked ghostlike in Sewanee, which experienced one of its famous fogs for the first time in months. It was a rainy fall day and we luxuriated in it.