Meanderings: Forget Global Warming

The weather today reminds me of The Swamp, a most excellent book about the Everglades in marked contrast to the classic The Everglades: River of Grass, the reading of which I found somewhat sleep-inducing. Hey, I know, it's just my experience, and I'm a tenement child at heart. Anyway, last night's forecast of another 7 days of "scattered thundershowers" reminds me of those poor, unsuspecting folks who bought land in the 'Glades and built farms, only to find themselves underwater a few years later.

See, the thing about Florida weather is that it sometimes tends to be feast or famine, although our more typical pattern would be sunny with a 50 percent chance of rain in the afternoon. But sometimes, like a few years ago, we came off a rather serious drought into literally forty days and nights of rain. It rained nearly our yearly total of rainfall in two months. Needless to say, about day 20, things began getting a bit water-logged, including the ground into which our septic tanks leached.

Hopefully that pattern won't be repeated this year, although we are coming off of a drought, and it has been raining a bit. You see, I forgot to mention the worst of it: Red Tide. If the pattern holds, we may soon feel its approach. We'll see.