Drought

6-1-09

When I returned to Minneapolis, the first bloom had not yet begun to wane from the lilacs and crabapple trees, nor had the sere leaves fallen in September yet crumbled completely to dust at their feet. Spring was young and thirsty, stirring petals in the dry creek bed. There was a groaning of frogs, a perpetual rustling of leaves: of the sea an inland echo that, tempered by the revisiting death of winter, uttered not any sublime, inhuman polyphony but only “hush, hush.”

There was a deep peace on the avenues, risen from the ground like fog where no fog was, and the shadows held still on Summit beside the rustic mansions of limestone and dark wood. The bells rang from the cathedral and from the Basilica for spring weddings. The forecast called for no rain and still no rain as the city began the third summer of its drought.

The last tide to wash over this place was made of glaciers, the detritus of whose wake lies since and ever beached, and these ten thousand lakes are drying tide pools.