In less than 15 hours, it has dropped from low 70s to 9 here on my canyon rim–one of the joys of living in the Panhandle of Texas where a mere change in wind direction can dictate the weather.  Yesterday afternoon, I was helping my daughter clean her back yard and ready the ground for planting some shrubs and a tree and now 60 degrees colder.  This type of drastic weather change has occurred repeatedly in the last few weeks.  Perhaps it has muddled my brain which keeps hopping back and forth from this to that.  First, the “this”.

Mostly, I read Latin American, American Indian, and Middle Eastern authors.  When I recently stopped by the library, I could find none of these that I had not already read so I picked up a book from a Dutch author of whom I had never previously heard, Margriet de Moor.  The book, a novel, The Duke of Egypt, tells the tale of a Gypsy man who meets this young Dutch woman.  They marry and lead a quite unusual life:  in the winter he lives with her on the family horse farm; in summer he leaves and lives with the Gypsies, wandering around Europe in their caravans.  When he is “home” with her, in the evenings he tells her tales of his Gypsy family and friends, centuries of history.  These tales shocked me:  centuries of discrimination, hangings–even Gypsy women hanged publicly for no other reason than they happened to be Gypsy in the wrong country at the wrong time, sick children whom no doctor would treat, starvation, driven from country to country.  Of course, like many people I have heard stories about Gypsies:  as a child my grandmother telling me that Gypsies stole other people’s children, a friend telling me the police said it was Gypsies when someone stole some silverware from her house, but I never really believed it.  Reading this book caused me to delve a bit more into Gypsy/Roma history only to learn even more tales of horror.  Hitler and his Nazis hated Gypsies almost as much as they hated Jews.  It is estimated that the Nazis sent at least ten per cent of the Gypsy population in Europe to the gas chamber.  On the positive side, I learned that many Gypsies were hired by people who raised horses to help them with their horse care because Gypsies were considered expert horse trainers and traders.  In addition, some hired them for their music to play for social events and festivals.

When several friends came over for dinner, I mentioned the book to them and my shock.  I wondered aloud as to why so many hated the Gypsies.  The general response was this:  Gypsies consistently live as they wish and refuse to follow the social norms of the rest of the population.  They refuse to settle down and live in one place, they enjoy life, dancing, drinking, roaming.  If you refuse to live like everyone else, the rest of the world will  punish you.

Then I moved on to the book I am reading now, Apocalyptic Planet:  Field Guide To The Future Of The Earth.  I am only on page 27 of 327, and already I have learned:  “Deserts generate most of the world’s airborne dust, contributing to a global migration of surface minerals.  Dust blowing from the southern Sahara is the single largest producer of iron for the mineral-poor soils of the Amazon in South America.  Half of this dust originates in the Bodele Depression north of Lake Chad, which produces about one hundred storms a year, each sending 40,000 tons of dust across the Atlantic to South America.”  And a bit further in the book:  much of the fertile High Plains here in the US (Kansas, eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, basically from Canada to Mexico) sit on top of a desert, e.g. the Sand Hills.  Currently, these sand hills remain stabilized by miles and miles of grass–our native short grass steppe.  It does not take much to imagine what would occur if drought continues and the grass disappears.  Once desertification occurs as it is now occurring in many places in the world, e.g. the Sahel, deserts consume.  Jonathan Overpeck, a leading climate researcher claims, “…we are significantly underestimating the severity of drought we could get in the future.”  He predicts many places now inhabited will become uninhabitable unless we initiate drastic changes in our water management.  People will be forced to move from places of little to no water to places “wherever there is no desert”.  He adds, “We are contributing enough change to the planet that we are moving toward more droughts instead of away from them.”  In the Sahel alone it is estimated that 500 million people will have to move to survive.  I think over this information and about the current drought here and look at the beautiful place where I write and live, wondering will it be habitable in one hundred years.

Now on to the “that”:  grateful I live here in the United States in spite of all our “problems”.  I could have been born in Ukraine, Syria, Central Aftican Republic, any of those places experiencing turmoil, fear, religious hatred, genocide, torture–the list goes on and on.  Instead here I am happy, relatively safe, warm in spite of the 9 degrees outside, well fed–you get the picture.