Cracks in the ground a foot deep and as wide as a man’s arm. Edges of asphalted roads actually cracking and falling off into the ditch in chunks the width of a sheet of paper. Grass in mid-summer as brown and crispy as if it was January. Temperatures well over 100 degrees starting in early May and continuing into September, only giving up because a killer hurricane came instead. We had a brief respite of high 80s weather last week, and it was heaven. Today we had a high of 96 degrees, and we’re thankful for that because it’s a cool-down from what we had all summer.
And now squirrels are committing suicide in our swimming pool. We’ve fished three of them out in the past two days. All we can figure is that the poor things are trying to get to water and are falling in.
I knew this has been a bad summer. Ask my Bonanza friends. I’ve been whining about it for months. But ten minutes ago the weather forecaster on television gave me a better idea of just how dry it is.
“Can you guess how many days it’s been since we had a two-inch rain?” he asked. “Go on, guess. Two hundred days? Three hundred?” And then he blasted us with the deadly truth. “People, it has been 437 days since we had a two-inch rain.”
My mouth dropped open. He made it sound so much worse, even though I already knew it was bad.
“That’s right,” he continued, and repeated the number just in case anyone thought they had heard wrong. “I had to go into the archives to figure this out. The last time we had two inches of rain was on July 21, 2007, when we got 2.12 inches.”
July 21, 2007. NOT 2008. 2007. We have not had a two-inch rain here in poor, shriveled up south-central Texas in over a year. Fourteen months, to be exact. Fourteen months. They call our state the Land of Contrast, and it has never been more true. The fact that our neighbors two hours to the south have homes underwater seems cruelly ludicrous—part of Texas has no grass because it’s all been washed away, and the rest has no grass because it all burned up months ago.
No wonder the squirrels are leaping to their deaths.
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