“Abnormal High Pressure”

Every time I check the weather forecast, it’s another week of 80 degrees or higher. It’s like running a treadmill: the seasonal destination never approaches. I’m getting a lot done, sprucing up my little midcentury house, bottling late tomatoes. Still picking a handful of raspberries every morning. The pink ladies on my apple tree don’t know how to ripen; they need a cold snap that should have turned them weeks ago. I keep telling myself to enjoy this, that rain and snow will come soon enough. Maybe. I tell myself the same thing about the world beyond this “abnormal high pressure” dome that covers me. The weather station tells us here in SLC that we’re in for “another quiet weekend.” Warm, dry, quiet — as the world explodes for human beings like me, like my family, in Ukraine, Sudan, Lebanon, Gaza, Israel … as the wind and water lay waste my own nation further east and south, as fire devours my beloved West, the stunning Uinta range less than a hundred miles from my “quiet weekend.” I used to think I wrote to figure things out. Now I think I write to take a long, loving look at the beautiful and terrible and familiar things I do not understand. Times like this, I’m admonished to “do something.” What that something is? For me, now? Attend to the record. Reach for the other. Answer the reach.