"Drought is a kind of madness. Drought combined with record heat makes you long to become subterranean, a mole digging into cool darkness. This longing feels the way desire feels when you are too young to recognize it as desire. Even safely inside a cool house, your body is telling you that something is off. What you long for cannot be had. Until you think about it for a moment, it can't even be named.
As a matter of technical fact, Davidson County, Tenn., where I live, is not in a state of drought, but the scattered showers that have blown in briefly here and there throughout the summer have not come to our yard. We got one hot rain so gentle it hardly broke the leaf canopy, and that was it for us all summer long. The forecasters at Nashville Severe Weather call these random pop-up showers "playing the wattery" — like a lottery but with water.
Day after day last week the temperature climbed — 99, 100, 101, 102 — and the air quality alerts arrived in flocks. Nashville Electric Service sent me an email: "Tips for Extreme Heat in Music City this Week." In the photos on the pet-rescue sites that I check obsessively now, hoping to find just the right canine family member for this newly dogless house, all the dogs are panting. I feel the need to pant myself...
Tennessee has had many instances this year of hotter than normal weather and droughts. I remember going home to Cumberland Gap (in the Appalachian Mountains) and experiencing it being unnaturally hot and dry. We were seeing signs of drought in an area that normally does not. I would check the drought map daily and watch as the severe areas spread further and wonder: "How a state with a climate like ours is struggling so much?" It's just interesting to me that we are really starting to see and feel the changes that we have always talked about happening to us in real time to the point that it can no longer be ignored.
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