Enough Rain

California has enough water – after years of rain, after years of drought, there's plenty more rain where that came from. Call it El Niño. Laden skies—even the Central Coast is still green, no tawny cat hills slumbering before the fire, yet. Lupines painting the hills with deft strokes. Monet, Pissarro in the rain, in muted greens, shapeshifting into dark trees, keeping the best secrets, counting their ages within each ring, diligently measuring times of rain and drought. General Sherman, a redwood dating back to the migrations that spurred the rise of the Roman Empire against the Barbarians, faithfully recorded each season—wet or dry—until some numbskull who couldn't stand the idea of something so old, cut it down with one of those big push/pull saws. They began counting the rings, never expecting to work past the birth of Christ, but count back they did. They were preoccupied with European data, the Magna Carta, the birth of Christ, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the burning of Carthage. But the trees recorded another kind of history, of weather, and drought, and rain. We are so newly come to this place, we speak of variables as if they were constants. California has enough, or not enough rain, depending on the need—but the redwood that framed this coast have measured time in eons—this last fragile ring of green we follow from the Ice Age to time-present. This time, this rain, this abundance, where everything is rainbow rainbow rainbow —to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop's silvered fish carrying God's flooded promise forth unto greener pastures.