Circles and Lines

Summer is progressing, and tending and mending continues. Chickens now have a new electric fence to ward off predators and encourage the hens to stay in their pen (don’t worry, the fence is off on Saturdays): lots of fresh grass and weeds to graze on, as well as a tasty worm or two.

The peas, so luxuriant a few weeks ago, have become grey and withered, leaving a few leathery pods that yield a surprising sweetness. Pull them out, plant a fall crop. The maize maze grows ever higher and more confusing; we are just training the vines up the gourd house. Cucumber and zucchini fruit hide themselves in a tangle and then appear unexpectedly in startling dimensions. Pumpkins look promising; melons hopeful.

Living with a garden is living with constant birth, life, death, and resurrection — a melodramatic statement, perhaps, but still true. Not just yearly with the circle of spring, summer, fall and winter, but also with many other cyles that recur within the summer season. One notorious cycle: blackfiles emerge from their watery wombs to wage heoric areal battles with creatures many times their size — at least the females do, the gentler males drink nectar. Females lay eggs, larva emerge and cling to rocks until transformed from water to sky creatures, rising in a tiny bubble of air and bursting into flight and the work of bringing forth another generation. Again and again.

The early meadow flowers have gone to seed, though a mowing or two returns them to youth temporarily and may bring another hay crop. Eventually even such intervention succumbs to what appears to be an envitable line of time. Fall and winter come, and no mater how many cycles of growing plants and flying insects, cold and snow return, a very little ice age. The line comes back on itself and becomes a circle. With multiple cycles within a summer, and the eventual return of spring, we have spheres upon spheres, an amalgest, like Ptolemy’s celestial geometry.

Anthropgenic global warming may be similar to a hot, dry spell in a New England summer, an interruption of what will some day return to a true ice age with its glaciers miles thick, pushing plants and animals south (in the Northern hemisphere). And like some hot spells and droughts, much may be lost in this extreme and accelarated change in the next years.

We appear to move in circles, but with each recurrance comes difference. Each summer the sun bakes the skin on my neck and I have become to notice lines and lost elasticity. My body will carry the memory of my broken ribs whenever I reach for a shovel. Evolution has transfomed this planet from a liquid stew of early life to its current array of animale and vegetabile. So many lives: lines and circles; spheres upon spheres.

Catastrophic species decline is occuring now, has occured before. What difference will we see in the next few spins of the rolling wheel of time?