Today the rain fell
and the small barn roof
was the timpani
in the symphony of the rain
Today the rain fell
and the big barn roof
thrummed like a thousand
marching hobnail boots.
But today hobnail boots are just practical, and hardly metaphoric.
Today the rain fell on my organic hobby farm. We market-garden at the nearby Farmer's Market, and this is the Harvest Moon -- but we have long since harvested, and now there's only preserves, to sell to our neighbors, from the black- and red-currents, the apples, the raspberries growing wild on our land.
We're in rural Nova Scotia, whose climate is pretty much like Maine's. Even the squash are in, and long since the beans, and now, only the few apples that relish a late freeze remain on the trees.
The last dragonfly was about three weeks ago. The last mosquito, about the same. Blackflies are long gone. Now it's just us, the land, the two dogs, the stream, and the closing-down of our micro-biome.
In the spring, the night teems with "peepers," the amphibians who all night scream "I'm available!"
In the summer, the biting bugs come out in late afternoon, seeking the solace of flesh, and one is wise to simply give up and come in. In the summer, I yearn for a way to keep on working long past when the bugs are finished.
Now it's the near-winter, now-finished, closing-down time. The trees have shifted; the grass has stopped growing. The stream, as ever, burbles around the house, toward broad cold wetland made by the beaver dam downstream.
We have potatoes, pulled from our ground, waiting to be brushed and stored in a cool, dark, dry place. We have onion greens entwined and hanging in the sunroom, drying and hardening.
Tonight, even though I fear the end of the world, and am firmly convinced that humans have created a society doomed to collapse, I'm feeling optimistic.
Nature will continue. Species will evolve in the new anthropogenic world.
The "economy" will likely collapse, as will the ecosystem we believed to be true, and inevitable, and endless.
My little biosystem may not survive intact -- if the Gulf Stream stops, Nova Scotia could become practically Arctic.
But there will still be seasons, and changes, and results. There will still be life, preparing for the change to winter.
Even if the economy collapses, life will remain.