I try not to get too worked up over what’s happening outside my neighborhood, but it’s hard to ignore the cruelty and corruption in Washington and the wars in Israel and Ukraine.

So I distract myself with what Bob calls “World Class Puttering.” Here he is yesterday on the business end of a shovel, digging a deep hole for a Fringe Tree from Rachel’s Native Plants. I took that photo before hanging our bed sheets on the line, after which I dug all the mondo grass from our pond garden.

When our chores turn onerous, we seek diversions from the natural world. It’s an especially good day when the box turtles return for the summer.

Her legs are dotted with yellow scales against a rusty background and when I caught up to her, I took note of the rainy cascade on her pleural scutes—six little clouds and a burst of rain on the scute in the middle of her right side.

Okay, here’s some turtle vocabulary:
Carapace: the top shell
Plastron: the bottom shell
Scutes: shell sections or scales
Vertebral Scutes: scales along the topline of the carapace
Plueral Scutes: scales along the side

Based on that pattern, I named her Rain and began looking for pictures from other years. The first time we saw her was in 2022, determined to cross through the chicken wire into our garden.

We learned how to tell Rain’s sex from the internet. Females have flat plastrons, and males have a little hollow in theirs. That slightly conclave shell helps him stay aboard when mating. Nature thinks of everything!

Rain isn’t huge, but our neighbor David Harris, an avid turtler, guesses she may be upwards of forty years old. He writes about his turtles at A Turtle For Every Log.

Other turtles have visited Trouts Farm over the years, and we usually catch them in our camera lens. In 2020, I photographed two turtles that I have not seen since. I gave them names so that I can recognize them if they return.

Comet’s pattern is similar to Rain’s, with more of a starburst vibe. We didn’t turn them over to look for a divot.

Zip has a disturbing lip line. It looks like someone sewed their lips shut. Both Comet and Zip have a bright dotted line along their topline.

2023 was a big year. Another dotted-line turtle showed up on July 1st.

I named it Tiger because its shell is so colorful.

And then we spotted a third turtle towards the end of July who clearly had business with Rain. I named him Leopard for his bold pattern, and because he was less stripy than Tiger.

I hope to see more turtles and plan on looking at their undersides. I used to worry about scaring them off with too much handling, but Rain keeps coming back, so I’m going for it.

We easily lose ourselves in outdoor work, surrounded by birdcalls and the scent of the tea roses, the sweet William, and now the Fringe Tree. I sometimes make it until noon without a glance at my newsletters, which makes for a healthy, sane life.

After I finish this post, I plan on pruning our azaleas and cleaning out the rain barrel. And when I see Rain moving around our yard, I’ll take a nature break to watch and wonder what she’s thinking or about to do next.

As we inch closer to Inauguration Day, I’ve been trying to imagine the best possible outcome, keeping myself informed without burying myself in bad news. I was hoping that a focus on the joys within my safe, community bubble would minimize the horror building in my chest.

But, there comes a point.

When the President-elect expressed his desire to aquire Greenland without ruling out military force, I could no longer contain myself. I was shocked that the presumptive Commander in Chief, the man with his finger on the nuclear button, has such ambitions.

Nearly three years ago, I watched in horror as Putin invaded Ukraine, not for one minute imagining that The United States might one day follow in Russia’s footsteps. I want to believe that my conservative friends, neighbors, and family members are as horrified as I am. I doubt they would have voted to invade a sovereign nation.

I don’t know what I can do to stop my country from becoming a mighty bludgeon, but I don’t want any part of it. I am not in lockstep with the brutish aims of a pathetic megalomaniac. For what it’s worth, my silence is broken.

On June ninth I woke to the sound of an acetaminophen bottle hitting the dryer and found a large black snake on the laundry room shelf. At eye level. Moments later it dropped to the floor to hide beneath the washing machine. This led to an unwholesome rodeo, with Bob wiggling-walking the dryer away from the wall, then loudly smacking the washer.

Frozen and barely awake I stood by, clutching a bath towel and later, a broom. “Put on your shoes!” I cried, slipping into my Teva flats. Bob ignored the shoe cue and kept banging until the snake came out and then we herded it out the back door. We don’t know how it got in or if it’s come back, nor do we know how many snakes there might be inside our house right now.

I immediately noticed an uptick in nightmares. Bad people doing bad things, with me trying to defend myself and others from murder, rape, and dismemberment. Yes, my Catholic upbringing—all those martyred saints—has proven fertile ground for night sweats.

A week later Tami saw a sizeable Black Bear ahead while riding her bike a couple of miles from our house. She moved to the other side of the road and once she saw that the bear was more interested in eating leaves than chasing her, she pedaled like hell.

So now I am hypersensitive to night sounds, and also self-soothing with sugar which does nothing good for my sleep patterns. I know I’m overreacting, but hey, try telling that to my sympathetic nervous system.

The other night I was awakened by something scratching or bumping against the wall behind my head, and with my high-alert synapses firing away, I nudged my hero and woke him up. Unperturbed, he jiggled the mattress to recreate the sound I thought I’d heard, and then he got up and pulled the bed away from the wall. Nevertheless, I lay there for another hour before falling back to sleep.

When I woke to morning light—arms at my side, stiff as a corpse—I heard something moving underneath the dresser. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t muster enough spit to talk so I got up and got a drink of water before crawling back under the sheet next to my unflappable husband.

Bob has been all patience and fortitude throughout all this snake business. He always comes up with a plan and has not teased me once for waking him up or wimping out. He hasn’t even said, “I don’t know what’s come over you,” even though he must be thinking it. I surely am. All my life, I’ve been unafraid, good in a crisis, always ready to chase down dogs, wasps, and cockroaches. Then suddenly I turn seventy, find a five-foot snake where it’s not supposed to be, and I’m all a-puddle.

After hearing Tami’s story, I asked Bob to set the trail camera up near the compost pile in case a bear shows up to gnaw corn cobs and cantaloupe skin with the possums. But the notion of a bear in our yard doesn’t concern me nearly as much as a snake in our bed.

As I lick the last pretzel crumb and set down my empty mug, a black vulture lands on the lawn between the persimmons. I watch the mockingbird chase it out to the ditch. You badass, I think, and wander towards the road to see if there’s a carcass I need to move before getting out the pitchfork and the wheelbarrow.

Canada is on fire. The smoke drifts south, and when it reaches the North Carolina Piedmont, I feel like I’m breathing with one lung. I check my right nostril, then my left, to see if one is clogged. Nope.

Bob and I took the threat of Global Warming seriously twenty years ago. We threw ourselves into the recycling movement, tried not to buy too much new stuff, did our best to use and reuse, started using biodiesel, and stopped eating meat. Yet we continued—with some guilt—to fill bags of household trash destined for the landfill.

We recently bought his and hers Teslas, complete with chargers, and discussed installing solar panels to offset our driving habit. We grow some of our food, seldom eat out, and rarely buy new clothes.

But it’s hard to feel complacent when the world’s on fire. All the predictions are coming true: the super tornadoes, monster storms, and now a heat wave sweeping across the lower United States.

I watch a young hummingbird—tiny and dark-headed—dip its beak into the center of the metal flower, its miniature toes curled around the perch. I count three this year: an adult male, a long-torsoed female, and this one youngster. They must be a family, yet they body slam each other all through the adjacent air space Star Wars style.

How long before our politicians agree to make good on their climate change promises? How much longer can I use our hummingbird feeders as a distraction?

Two maxims fight for attention in my brain:
“If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” and
“Stay in the now.”

I was an activist in my forties and fifties. Now, pushing seventy, I’ve passed the baton. I realize that my “simple” life puts more strain on the planet than the average world citizen’s life does—as an American, I have more resources at my disposal—but I will try not to guilt myself over this. I’ve decided to let the little birds hypnotize me, and allow the summer heat to lull me into a torpor. I will slow my footfalls to match my lungs.

I hear the Wood thrush warble its lovely song from a few trees away, perhaps one of our majestic Willow Oaks. Our Evening primrose blossoms—creamy yellow—are still open. It’s only 66° and the sun has not yet cleared the trees to brush them closed with its hot breath. The air smells richly alive. I can feel its moisture on my tanned arms. I lean back and let summer take me.

I feed the guilt
From indoor things I didn’t do
To the tawny canine
Yawning at my feet
Scrap by scrap

Take this, spring dog
Here is the writing I didn’t do
The un-edited audio tapes
The jigsaw in its box
My dead mother’s unread letters

Take the languishing clay
The pointed colored pencils
And all the unread books

Take it all, Spring Dingo, eat it up
Make me lighter
Set me free

It is chilly this morning and the house is quiet—no grinders, drills, or hammers. Just me staring out at the azaleas, hot fuchsia carpeting twiggy branches. A Ruby-throated hummingbird preens in the garden, toes wrapped around the goat wire, and a green-lipped frog stares at the impatiens I planted Thursday. The air is still, holding its breath, awaiting rain.

In a couple of hours I will pick Bob up at the airport, returning from a week of Kansas farm audits. I will have washed the North Carolina pine pollen from our blue car, and I will bring him to our house.

I expect he’ll find our home unrecognizable in places, blanketed in new blooms, pollen, and construction dust. I’m hoping he isn’t too shaken by the state of our world. We’ve been updating each other with texted photos in an attempt to fuse our disparate realities.

Our living room is bare except for Bob’s flower shelves, our bedroom furniture is obscured by dust, and the floor is agape in our master bath.

Nothing shatters the illusion of a clean and orderly life quicker than finding evidence of rodents in your walls. Here, all along, we’ve been sharing our home with critters who defecate inches from where we pee and brush our teeth.

Our kitchen resembles an after-hours pub, dining room chairs double-stacked and resting upside down atop tables, their unfinished undersides pointed towards the popcorn ceiling.

Bob will discover that we’ve moved into the guest room and that our bathroom essentials now live in our hall closet. How many times over the last week did I find myself searching for a nail clipper or rifling through a stack of bins for a spare towel? Now it will be his turn.

Our offices are largely unscathed, and the kitchen counters function in their normal manner. I’ve restocked Bob’s essentials—coffee, grapes, and cheese—and made a quart of teriyaki sauce and some spiced nuts. We’ll have asparagus soup for dinner—his request—and our customary Sunday dinner of Kentucky Fried Tofu and Brussels sprouts.

I’d completely forgotten this is Easter weekend, so no peas and baby onions in cream sauce, no ham-like roast. Just the ordinary—as close-to-usual—a meal to make us forget the dry Kansas air, the hotel rooms and rented cars, the upturned chairs, the rodent shit, and the damp earth beneath our cozy home.

Invigorated with negative ions, I continue out to the grasslands. The golden stalks rustle in the light breeze. My thoughts churn slower with every step. It takes about half a mile to transition from driving to walking. I’d been moving so fast, lurching from one task to another, speeding around in my car. I turn left after a nesting box and in a minute I can see the lake shimmering ahead. Then I hear the Hum.

~*~

At first, I only heard it when I got up to pee at night. It seemed to come from the exhaust vent. I’d stand on tiptoe, straining to hear. It is decidedly a hum, the incessant weaving of two low notes, kind of like a dissected busy tone: HmmmmUhmmmHmmmmUhmmm It reminds me of a foghorn.

“Do you hear that?” I ask Bob one morning after the refrigerator shut off. He lay silent, straining. “I think I do,” he says, but neither of us is convinced.

By then I’d been hearing it for months—since midsummer at least. “It seems to be coming from inside the house because I don’t hear it outside,” I say. “Do you think it’s just the hum of our electrical system? If so, why would I suddenly start hearing it?”

“Do you want me to turn off the main breaker?”

“Yes,” I said biting my lip in gratitude.

Bob disappears into our bedroom closet and shuts everything down. He comes back to bed and we hold our breath. “I still hear it,” I say. Dang. Must be an earworm. Or aliens.

I wondered if someone has put up a server in our neighborhood. I’d read about a man who started hearing a persistent, barely-audible hum. He walked until he found the source, and discovered a windowless building full of computers.

Or, maybe it’s coming from the nearby quarry. I had not heard the rock grinders at 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) for a while. Maybe they’ve changed equipment. But then I hear the grinders again, and along with it, the hum.

I google “low hum” and read about “the world hum” which apparently only 2% of the population can hear. I read about regional hums, like the ones in Windsor, Aukland, and, Taos.

I decide it’s either environmental or low-frequency tinnitus—between 75 and 80 hertz. My brother, Jamie, who suffers from tinnitus reports hearing a much higher pitch. I discover that when I plug my ears, the humming stops. Jamie tries this and still hears his 4,000-hertz whine.

~*~

We live by sight, sound, and touch. When the sky darkens during an eclipse, the birds go to roost and the insects sing. When the insects start talking, I wind down my day. I hear the hiss of a pot about to boil over, or the whump of a wreck on the road outside our house, or the moan of my man in pain, and I jump into action.

It takes a few weeks for me to sleep through the night in a new place. I wake with every new sound, sounds that eventually become part of my new realm of consciousness and not cause for alarm.

Mrs. Kravitz, from the ’60s TV show Bewitched, was ridiculed for her vigilance, but she wasn’t wrong. Someone needs to pay attention. My horse, Jesse, used to stand at the edge of the field while his pasture mates lay in the sun. Rarely did he take a turn at sprawling in the hot grass.

Like Mrs. Kravitz and Jesse, I took it upon myself to pay attention. “You were the centurion,” my mother used to tell me. “You’d stand at the doorway watching the boys play, and you’d let me know if anything went wrong.”

I ask my friend, Kersten, if she’s been hearing a low hum—a new neighborhood sound—and she says yes. My heart leaps. Maybe I’m not crazy after all!

Bob is sure he hears it now, too. “It sounds like a surging motor,” he says, making the hum from behind closed lips. A surging motor. That makes me think about 3M again, so I open Google Earth Pro for a bird’s eye view of our neighborhood. What I see there blows my mind.

In March of 2021, there were two main quarries not far from our house, grinding away at rock, day and night.

By April 2021, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company had added a third quarry a quarter of a mile closer to our house.

Meanwhile, they ramped up production in one of the original quarries.

The sound was alarmingly loud as I stood in the road snapping these photos. I felt like a spy, and it shook me when a pick up truck approached. I waved cheerily, hid my camera, and walked purposefully back to my car, fighting the urge to look back. Did I see a gun rack? Was I too close to his house?

The lake grows closer and I can smell the damp mud ahead. I am not alone, I think. I have the Moncure Hum to keep me company. As quiet as a beating heart, the sound that will likely follow me to my grave.

Coffee slightly bitter, not as sweet as Bob’s, but then he didn’t eat a spoonful of lemon curd before lying down for the night. So yes, you consume more than your share of sugar between the curd, and the candied orange slices, the chocolate, and the blueberry muffin you brought home for him but ate instead because he was “being good.” Yet he managed, in his sugar-free state, to lay awake like you, the two of you separated by a writhing berm of tangled sheets.

Yesterday, you read that seven out of twelve trash collection centers in your county have closed because they’re short three CDL drivers and you remember how the trash piled up on Guam after Typhoon Paka whipped their ass. You remember getting up at 3:00 AM to fill buckets from the bathtub tap because that’s when water came through the pipe. You think about the power outages in Ghana, sometimes lasting for days, and how hard it was to get anything done at the end of the dry season in Belize. And you see it all starting to slide apart here in the United States. End of empire. This is what it looks like.

You walk to the garden with your white mug, a gift from Sharyl with a picture of her dead horse Silver’s sire, a white Missouri Foxtrotter with a crested neck, thinking, I’ve been drinking coffee from this mug for fourteen years.

You see no signs of new edamame damage and hope it means the rabbit you chased off yesterday has not wriggled back inside the fortified garden fence. It was such a tiny little thing, and you felt bad taking up the hose to chase it out of the garden. You flushed it from the asparagus, watching in horror as it beat itself against the corner post even though the gate was open, finally squeezing itself through a rectangle of goat fence and clawing its way up the outside layer of chicken wire to burst out the top and sprint away.

The flutter in your chest is saying, This heat is what they’re talking about — the rest of your life is gonna be crispy, fried hell. The world is up in flames, ice caps melting, and we knew it all along but lacked the political will to avoid the crash. All your advocacy, your good example — we got ourselves quoted in a book about garbage, for chrissakes — all of it for naught.

You think you might run a load of towels today but know you shouldn’t use the dryer because the world is melting, but then they’ll be line-crispy and you’ll have to crumple them soft between your fists, folding and twisting like an Inuit woman masticating seal leather.

You think about what your last twenty-five years will look like, smell like, taste like — harder than hoped, made worse every time you look at your step-daughters’ Instagram posts, their whole lives ahead, the photos of the grandkids. But you bring yourself back from the sweaty rim of existential abyss with another sip of pure bliss and a satisfied look at the trim edge between the lawn and your rose garden. You did that, you tell yourself. You made that pretty line with your trimmer.

The A/C starts up, the sharp blades spinning so fast you can’t even see them. You jump like you always do, thinking about how good you have it here. Really. You’re not on fire, or wading through water in your living room.

The warm Sumatran blend in your straight-sided mug makes you wonder where even is Sumatra? and, was this fair trade coffee? and, what does that even mean? You don’t know because you didn’t buy it, you only brew it and drink it, and ran to the porch to pick it up after the driver tossed it on the sun-bleached deck before getting back in his truck to deliver other doo-dads to other lucky people.

Yes, we’ve got it good here at the end of empire. Water, electricity, coffee . . . Probably everything will unravel so slowly that we won’t live to see the worst of it. But who knows, maybe the world will pull out of this spiral and level out. Maybe everything will be all right.

“How long do you want to live?” Bob asks over a steaming bowl of fried cabbage on our shaded back porch. My eyes wander upwards, my tongue chasing a piece of fried food. “I’d like to make it to eighty-five,” I say, placing my bowl on the wooden table to my left.

“That’s what I was thinking, too.”

A few feet away, two hummingbirds face each other in a waggle dance. “They must be courting,” Bob says.

“I like the way the sun filters through their cute little tails.”

“That way I’ll only have to make it to eighty. Or seventy-nine and a half.”

“No, wait,” I say, struggling with the math.

The perfect scenario involves painless, simultaneous death. Maybe we should believe in The Rapture. What a great way to go, just lift off and ascend into another reality. A reality in which the ditch doesn’t need mowing, and dinner dishes don’t keep appearing in the kitchen sink. A world without friction, pain, or worry. Silent bliss.

Bob and I believe in nothing after death. Not heaven, which frankly sounds terribly boring — all needs met, no hard surfaces, no problems to solve. We prefer the notion of nothingness.

Not life after death. Just nothing. Complete and utter nothing, same as before we were born. No memory, no brain whirring away, no sensations. No guilt for the ones we leave behind to sweat it out.

We finish our dinner and go back inside. Bob turns the A/C back on, and I wash the dishes. I wipe my hands on the towel that hangs off the oven handle while he pulls down the movie screen and fires up the Roku.

We’re still on the bus, still tooling along towards wherever it is we’re going. If all goes as planned, we’ll arrive at our stop before things get really ugly.

I had been out running errands and stopped to see Helen and Judy. They were pampering me with chocolate and pashmina as this went down. When I climbed back into my car, I turned on the radio and listened in disbelief. It was one of those this-can’t-be-happening moments.

I was nine years old the last time my world view was shaken to this degree. Like every other pink-faced elementary school student, I was swept up in Kennedy’s Camelot. I believed our leaders were good men, revered and invincible.

John F. Kennedy’s assassination turned these assumptions inside out and I was floored, my sense of reality crushed like a mouse beneath a hard-soled boot.

In the days following January 6, details of the riot settled into my chest like a bad cold, shattering my belief that regardless of our political leanings, we were all Americans who held some things sacred. That life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness did not include permission to ransack the capitol in search of the Vice President and other lawmakers who had been labeled traitors by their leader. I believed that a President would never incite an insurrection and that if he did he would meet with swift justice.

Now I know that all bets are off, anything can happen, and some will stop at nothing to achieve their moment of glory. I see that our national bloodstream is infected with people who believe the system must be shredded but who have no plan for how to replace the essential services provided by that system. And that a corrupt, delusional leader can retain a 30% approval rating.

I’ve lived in the third world, with potholes big enough to swallow a motorcycle, intermittent water and electricity, and undisguised corruption. I’ve seen how hard it is to survive when it’s every-man-for-himself, where mayhem is beyond control. It isn’t pretty and it is not what I want for my children and grandchildren.

January 6 was my red pill/blue pill moment, a gut punch to my understanding of the human race. It only took a few broken windows to see that reality has always been subjective, that we never were a union, and that there never was equal justice for all.

Ultimately, I did get my head around Kennedy’s death, and was reborn as a wiser, albeit more jaded me. I hope to one day look back upon the Capitol siege with some kind of understanding.

Both sides agree that freedom and democracy are at stake. I want to think this is where our path forward begins.