It’s a typical mid-summer day, big puffy marshmallow clouds filling the sky, stately ships sailing on a gentle summer breeze.
Safe inside your temperature controlled house, you watch as the black asphalt driveway dances shimmering in the heat.
The sidewalk capitulates to the sun, 180 degrees and counting, almost boiling, hot enough to burn little hands and knees. No playground today.
The air is smoky yellowish-gray, filled with gritty bits of burned Canadian forest, an unwelcome gift from our polite northern neighbors.
You ponder whether it’s worth going out, whether to hopscotch from the house to the car to the store and back again, darting from one man-made refrigerated ecosystem to the next,
While outside the earth shudders as another glacier slides crashing into the sea.
Ocean levels are rising, the bees are disappearing. One after another, animal species are quietly going extinct.
And over it all presides the sun, bright symbol of cheerfulness, mother of all life here on earth. She has become our adversary, relentless, scorching, unforgiving.
The crops in the field already know this. Row after row, they stand sentinel, dejected and sad, yellow leaves barely stirring, sorrowful apologies for the vibrant food supply we somehow still take for granted.
The ecosystem perches unsteadily on the edge of a razor blade, poised for a great rebirth that will not include humans, while you blithely check your Facebook page for the twentieth time today, to see if your friend liked your funny post.
Huh, you say, sipping your iced coffee. Somebody should do something about that.
Susan Greenberg Feltman 