It’s too damned hot to think. Am I just ruined by mountain climes? When I arrived here at my Texas home at the very end of August, my garden was owned by weeds, which had prospered everywhere. Beds and paths alike were knee high. As I made my way back to Leon County, the short leg from Ft. Worth my only objective for a Saturday, I welcomed an invitation from neighbors Jim and Robert to stop by for a hamburger before making the last three miles to the place from which I had been absent for the last four months—four mostly rain deprived months. After all, faced with the prospect of problems to be solved, who wouldn’t opt to delay the inevitable. While August had generously given up significant moisture, June and July had taken their toll in consistent temps hovering in the mid 90s, with nighttime lows dropping to perhaps 80.
That’s too damned hot, and it reminds me of a historical note I learned some years ago. The famous Civil War general, Philip Sheridan, is credited with having said, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d rent Texas and live in Hell.” He said this some 35 years before the storm of 1900 claimed between 6000 and 12,000 lives in Galveston—a category 4 according to current measuring standards—changing the course of history and leaving Galveston in wreckage, paving the way for Houston to become the largest city in Texas and the fourth largest in the nation.
We are well into September, and the high continues to hover around 95. The autumnal equinox will come and go, and those of us who are blessed to live in refrigerated air will continue to retreat to our shelters for the better part of every 24 hours. We are spoiled. I suppose, we are weakened by a luxury most southerners embraced in the second half of the 20th century. And though I remember well growing up and graduating from high school in 1961 without air conditioning, I wouldn’t want to live here without it now. Yet we may get to witness heat and humidity where we sleep, and indeed the darkness, as Hurricane Ike makes its way through our part of Texas.
As we wait out the latest in the fall 2008 crop of hurricanes, I’m reminding myself of good advice my friend Eugene offered recently. “In times of stress I attempt to consider the worst possible alternative, then say thanks for the light load I have been handed.” Oh, that this would be the first thought that comes to mind when I’m feeling pitiful for myself. In the early hours of this day, the birds are doing their usual announcements of the coming of dawn. The cows and their offspring who graze the land around my home are lowing. And I wonder if in their feathered and hidebound sense of things they feel something threatening in the air and thus are giving voice to it.
Perhaps I’m beginning to understand why before leaving New Mexico I finally raked up the courage to own something that nagged me in the several days before abandoning my fledgling high desert home for what, in my mind, insisted on making a claim on me here in Texas. I didn’t understand what was in play, what waited in the wings speaking silently but oh so emphatically about the uncertain prospects of my making it back to northern New Mexico for the changing of the leaves, for that opportunity to once again embrace the bends in the mountain roads winding up into the Sangre de Cristos, for that chance to gasp, “oh-h, my God”. In early August, as I speculated about getting back “in time” to a friend who was leaving her summer place out on the mesa between Santa Fe and Taos and heading back to her home in Oklahoma, she suggested, “There will always be leaves”. Well, of course, for someone. And there are always opportunities to react to the awesomeness of our creator.
I guess we tend to be where we need to be. As the storm breathes down the neck of coastal, and even inland, inhabitants, friends here are grieving the death of one of their four sons, the second in age, in his 40s, the victim of a freak accident. For a week they kept vigil at his hospital bedside, and now they have had to let him go. I can’t imagine the crushing sense of loss. I just heard someone on cable network news answer what seems like a silly question from a news reporter concerning what it feels like to be fleeing, leaving behind all of your earthly possessions. “All you need are your pictures and a prayer.”
Our cousin from southeast Texas, who just spent two nights in my sister Joan’s home here on the land in Leon County less than two weeks ago—how odd that sounds when I consider that this home was our family home for 35 years, the home where our mother died only 18 months ago, and her mother 25 years before her—is once again on the road, fleeing another storm. Strange, I don’t remember asking her what she chose to save the last time, what she and her daughter brought with them. I seem to recall that much of their family treasure has already been claimed by previous acts of God.
So as pilgrims make their way, and some have chosen not to flee, we can only wait to see the outcome. Network television will reflect and record for the world the progress of nature at its angriest. Many of us will pray to dodge the bullet and hope to give thanks for the light load we’ve been handed. Some of us will be distracted by personal loss that actually defies description. Many will us will understand in our most essential heart that, unlike what some want to suggest, it isn’t just about choices.
Choices Before the Autumnal Equinox—Normangee, Texas (September 12, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
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