Echoes

I awoke to another sparkling early summer day, cool and cloudless. By mid afternoon the temperature had risen into the mid-eighties, and a lake cooled breeze was blowing from the west. Lake Chaplain remains cold for late June and the wind cools as it blows across the chilly water’s surface. On a low humidity day like today, the net effect is a sort of natural air conditioning.

In the forest the leaves have darkened from spring’s yellow hues to a chlorophyll dense green, completely hiding the hill that stands immediately behind our house. The vegetables in the garden remain a bit spotty, even with replanting, but the flower transplants are already showing brilliant bloom. The world is lush and I am challenged to remember that in six or eight weeks I will be writing about the thinning forest canopy and the first colors of approaching autumn.

We are in the thick of packing, boxes sprouting here and there throughout the house, awaiting the trip to a closet or the basement. We pack boxes when we have a moment, and there is often some lag time before they find their way into storage. They sit here and there, a constant reminder that we are in transition, and contribute to the general sense of chaos that has descended upon the house. Faced with change of this magnitude, we are sorely challenged to keep some semblance of order.

Moving is immensely daunting and fatiguing, even as we know from long experience that we will soon regain a sense of settledness and equilibrium. Still, this move is somehow more disconcerting as it is taking place against a background of rapidly intensifying climate change and ecosystem perturbation. We know that most likely we will be settled snugly into our new home by winter, but do not know whether the larger house we live in, the Earth, will continue to sustain us and the other species with which we share the planet. More disturbing still is the gnawing awareness that the magnitude of the problem remains abstract and distant to too many people.

There are always echos reverberating through our everyday lives, complex references to past events that attach themselves to our lived experience and consciously or unconsciously shape meaning making. This move seems dense with them.