When you are old, you watch the raindrops hesitate before tumbling down the windshield.

You admire the ballet of leaves in the breeze.

You eat two extra cookies.

You are grateful for the kindness of young people; you look them in the eye and say, “Thank you”.

You want to throw a rock or fire a gun at those who would despoil the world for your grandchildren.

And you know that you are culpable every time you lie down to an air-conditioned sleep.

You still extend your arms wide to hold the earth and pray that love does indeed conquer evil, if only for a time.

You also know that Vishnu and Shiva, God and Satan, Harry Potter and Voldemort, live forever and ever.

And you are grateful that the fallen amaryllis leaf stands tall again after the rain.

By Rita Saylors and Thorpe Butler

Blessed are the rich and powerful, for they shall make the Earth their playground even as they

destroy it.

Blessed are the arrogant, for they shall rejoice as they trample the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after inequity, for they shall remain blind to all

suffering they cause.

Blessed are the warmongers, for they shall persecute the helpless.

Blessed are the corrupt, for they shall go unpunished.

Blessed are those who tell lies against others, for they shall be believed.

Rejoice and be glad, for great is their reward on Earth, if not in heaven.

In 1962, in what seems like yesterday, I often walked from my apartment above Barton Springs in Austin, down the limestone-rocky, cedar thicket, to the seventy-degree spring-fed pools below. Then, I easily navigated the uneven rocks that passed for steps down to the water.  Today, in 2024, I don’t even consider finding the path down the woods but drive and make my way from the parking lot to the steps, familiar still in spite of the decades since my last visit.  I don’t plan to swim—I have to get back to Houston—but I want to see the water. Giving in to nostalgia is irresistible.  I stop at the steps—how uneven!—and realize there is no hand-rail.  Such details were of no account in 1962 and so, of course, not in my memory.  I look down and take a deep breath. 

The sixty-two years’ time-lapse between visits shrinks to minutes in my mind.  I can see myself both as I was in 1962 and in 2024, more with a sense of puzzlement than anything else.  What is aging but slow cellular changes only recognizable after they have happened?  At this moment a two-way mirror in my mind shows the young self and the old self back to each other.  I know, of course, that the steps will be dangerous, but memory holds them as no cause for concern.  I feel outside myself, observing as others might see me, an old woman out of place and foolish.  But I don’t care how I am observed, feeling driven recklessly to see the blue-green pools one more time. 

I notice that on each side of the steps are slightly raised borders.  I could bend over and touch them for balance.  And why is balance such a problem anyway?  Lord knows, I have worked hard enough on it.  So I make my way slowly, always holding a finger onto the side rocks. With such uneven limestones I have to concentrate, one by one.  And then I come to the end of the raised sides.  There are three more steps, more uneven and rounded, with nothing to balance on.   I stop, let go, and try to steady myself.  Only three steps.  If I had fallen, I probably would not be sitting at the computer now.  But I make it to the ground and take in the view: same blue-green water.   Same bikini-clad, tanned bodies, all young. Same trees line the banks, but no one seeks their shade.  These kids don’t think about skin cancer yet.  In my mind, I am in the water with them, shivering delightedly, fully in the moment.

A white-haired man with a teen-age girl beside him stands not far away.  They don’t have swim suits on, so, like me, look odd.  They move toward me, and the man asks if I know where one gets tickets to a pool on the other side of a fence.  I tell him what my memory of sixty-two years ago contains, and we laugh.  I ask him where he is from, he says Denmark, and then I recognize his faint accent over excellent English.  He and his daughter are in Austin visiting his son, who works, of course, for a tech company.  We chat about the hot afternoon, the cold pools, his time living in the US.  The daughter says nothing, but looks at me as if she can’t figure out what in the world I am doing there.  I explain that I lived as a student above the Springs and want to see them one more time.  She looks as if she takes pity on me.  I think sardonically, if not compassionately, that she will experience old age, too.  We three wish each other a pleasant visit, and I make my way back to those treacherous steps. 

This time I see a vendor standing next to the first three, most dangerous ones.  He is to my left about ten feet away with his back to me.  I say, “Sir, can you give me a hand?”  I add, trying for a bit of self-deprecating humor, “I don’t want to fall on your things.  He is startled and swings around, offering a hand.  He gets the joke, but his wife, I assume, who is selling food on the other side of the steps, is having none of it.  I see myself in her face, a privileged white woman, asking for favors where she has no business being.  She is accurate, but I can’t care.  I take his hand, walk up three steps, and stand to take in the view one more time. 

I had gotten used to it.  At first I was determined to fight.  An essay in the New York Times by a famous poet who had lost almost all vision encouraged me, so I booked an appointment with Lighthouse Houston.  I learned about lighting and magnification devices, got a prescription for computer glasses, and was tested to check my ability to drive—yes, to daytime, no to nightime.  I read a New Yorker article about a center for the blind in Colorado where people are taught to prepare meals for sixty with no help and are dropped off in an unknown location to make their way back to the training center on their own.  I couldn’t imagine ever being willing to do such things.  The idea of even going to the training center gave me the willies.  Besides, I didn’t expect ever to go blind.  Just be, as I was,  unable to read street signs, endure the frustration of going back and forth to a new recipe with a magnifying glass while trying to cook, not be able find my phone without a flashlight or read sheet music in my beloved choir practice.  Frustration was built in to almost everything I did, except sleep.  I began pulling inward, distancing from life.   In the odd moment, I wondered if this is how people begin to prepare for death.

Then everything changed.  My retinologist, who treats my macular degeneration, discovered light-obscuring tissue in both eyes that sometimes develops after cataract surgery.  It could be zapped by a laser, so light could come back into the eye. Of course, I booked appointments for first one eye and then the other a few weeks later.  The opthomologist was almost gleeful in telling me about the change in vision I could expect.  So I had no fear when I put my chin in front of a machine that flashed a bright light into my eye and clicked four times.  That was it.  I walked back into the waiting room and, even with macular degeneration, my right eye could see everyone’s faces clearly and read the signs on the receptionist’s desk.  On the way home, I shut my left eye to test what I could see as my husband drove on the freeway.  A month later I put my chin on the brace once again and this time counted fourteen clicks.  Was the left eye more resistant?  So I wondered what the results might be.  This time on the way home I didn’t need to close one eye; the fog had lifted.  I could read street signs, see leaves on trees, read license plates of cars in front of us.  Once again I can read newspapers in the morning and lie in bed at night reading a book.  Typing emails is no longer agony; anxiety while driving has disappeared.  I can almost imagine driving on the freeways again.  I have my old life back.

So I have been taken back in time, given a reprieve. Along with deep gratitude and happiness comes a renewed feeling of responsibility to make the most of things.  But I have to admit there was a certain comfort in being back there.  Coming into renewed life is a fascinating adjustment I am grateful to make.   Yet when the time comes, I know I can go back inside.

After three weeks of 100-degree temperatures, it’s raining.  I go outside and let the rain wet my hair and splash widening drops on my shirt and pants.  I feel its coolness against the top of my feet and along my lower arms.  I smell the scent of dirt risingfrom the flower beds and see drops bounce off the stone patio.  The grass and heat-tolerant Asian Jasmine must be getting a drink.  The rain doesn’t last long, but it breaks the heat.  How cool 90 degrees seems!  

Recently, the Houston PBS station aired a documentary about Rachel Carson.  As I watched, I thought back to 1964 when her book Silent Spring appeared, and the word ecology first came into my consciousness.  The notion that everything on the earthis connected to everything else on the earth came as a revelation. After all, I had grown up in post-World War II America where the only limits many people felt were economic ones.  My father instructed my sister and me to turn the lights off in a room when we left it, not because it would save electricity and lessen global warming, but because it would save us money.  Like everyone else, when our family took road trips, we threw our gum and candy wrappers out the car window.  Coke bottles we took home, not because they would trash (and break on) the roadside, but because we could take them back to the store for a few pennies.  It all seems so innocent and long-ago.  

Carson’s book helped wake us up.  Within a few years, DDT was regulated; the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed; the EPA was started, even as powerful corporate interests lobbied and propagandized against them.  Since the legislation of the 1970s, corporate interests have succeeded in slowing environmental legislation.  Even though scientists warned that carbon dioxide in the air warms the planet like a blanket, many believed that we would feel it only decades from now. 

So let me tell you how it feels now:  The sun becomes the enemy.  If I go for a walk in the morning, I weave from shady spot to shady spot.  When I come back, I must hurry to do errands and outside chores before noon.  Walking across a Target parking lot at 4 p.m. with no shade is like walking through hell.  The heat rises from the pavement and blasts my face; the sun overhead burns my skin; the glare blinds me.  A hat or an umbrella don’t help; they just block out any air movement around my face.  

So how are people here reacting to this heat?  When I meet friends in my middle-class economic and social strata for lunch, we blithely talk about staying inside in the air conditioning, going from house to car and back to house again.  Maybe we offer a concerned comment about the construction workers we passed on the way to the restaurant who work all day in the heat; rarely does such concern go beyond talk.  At least one such outside worker has died, and we lament the failure of a bill introduced in the Texas Legislature to mandate water breaks at construction sites.  Even that little nod to humanity over profit got squelched.  

As I feel the anger rise, I begin to rant, but I realize that ranting without action is of no use.  Should we take to the streets, join a climate action group, write letters? Some may think they will escape the heat dome, or the fire, blizzard, hurricane, or flood.  But evidence otherwise  is growing:  fires in the American West and Canada, smoky skies in New York and Chicago, drought in the heartland, hurricanes along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts—in the last few years, just about the whole U.S. has been affected.  And then there is the rest of the world.

Now, however, in Houston the rain has cooled the air, and the sky is clear. The birds and squirrels are skittering about, and we have a reprieve for a bit. The old climate I knew, the before-time, returns, however briefly. But let me not be lulled into passivity by this cooling air in my backyard. Rachel Carson wrote a book; what will I do? What will the rest of us do?