Shelter in Place, San Francisco, January 30, 2021

We’ve had two inches of rain this week and yet the volume is still only 50% of what we need to have a normal summer. The window gets ever smaller for replenishing the city’s water supplies and damping down surrounding forests in time for summer’s usual drought and autumn’s fire season (in December the rain was sparse enough that we saw fire warnings in this neck of the woods, very rare this time of year). So, heavy rain is welcome, though it brings trouble of its own beyond the gloomy sky above our house and garden. Just south of us - where the fires bared the hills last summer, people are being evacuated in anticipation of sudden mudslides yet to come. And a little further down, a remote and winding portion of the highway opened up and washed right into the the ocean.

California, I am still learning, is not just a land of opportunity; it is a mountain of trouble and, it seems, we live continually on the edge.