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I don’t like being in the city in August, so I escape on weekends — when I can. Nothing glamorous, but to a place with a garden and where I can hear cicadas (something very important to me since I associate it with childhood).
This morning, I read in the newspaper that the ocean is experiencing heat waves as well — a very frightening notion. So often, we protect ourselves from comprehending the full terror of the world through our sheer ignorance of it. Apocalypse is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But on my garden porch, it’s hard to internalize my own statement —
It’s a grey, cool morning. I’m eating oatmeal, pouring myself coffee, reading the superb essays of V.S. Pritchett. The flashes of green around me are very deep, very intense; nature is in full-flush, crowned with its own glory.
It seems possible that the earth could collapse around my little fortress until I was the very last creature alive, still eating my oatmeal.
