The Tree in Drought -- a Passage by Alexandra Ranieri

We are in the middle of a drought. The earth flanking the sidewalks has peeled away, making miniature chasms; and more of these riddle the gray parched ground, where the grass in brown tufts slowly dies.

Yet the trees, shrubs, even smaller plants better adapted to such conditions thrive, or at least strive. The trees in particular fill this observer with awe. What secret stores do they plunder in such times? What networks of fungi and bacteria do they exploit in their errand for drink? What cool dark places, whose soil last beheld the sun hundreds of years ago, do their roots sift for every molecule of water?

How little we know of such places, in comparison with these creatures! They, who make it half their home, would be bemused, I am sure, by our mortal dread of six feet under. The supplier of half our good things, the crucible of life, bed of the corn which feeds us and the rose which delights our every sense—this we revile as Hell, while the very boundaries of our miraculous speck, the place where air gives way to dark matter, and where even the hardy creatures who make their homes at the top of Mt. Everest and at the bottom of the Mariana Trench may not venture—this desert we label Heaven! This is back to front, surely.