The rains have come this year, and I welcome the quiet melancholy they bring. Because if I am not sad in December, it means the sun is shining too brightly, and the soil will be parched come spring.

It has been so hot these last summers. It is odd to be aging, looking toward the last season of one’s life, and to feel at the same time that the Earth itself is also looking toward its last season. Shall we go out together with a bang? Will we both be whimpering, waiting for the end to come, not knowing whose will come first?

I was going to be a writer in this last score of my life, an obscure essayist, whose work might not be discovered until long after her death, by some future generation looking backward for insight. But now I do not know if there will be any readers left. There may be only content-consumers, or there may be no one at all.

But if the rains keep this up, I’ll have another glorious spring meadow bloom to look forward to, a riot of chaotic line and color outside my study window. If I keep planting these seeds, I know that even if I and all my kind are gone, the Earth won’t really be gone as well, it will just be relieved of a burden. The fossil fuels will have stopped their relentless burn, and all the carbon will eventually sink back into the soil and feed these citizens of the meadow, both plant and animal. What my eyes have seen after the luck of a rainy season will continue, and I don’t need to be here to see it for it to be ravishing.

In the meantime, if the cornflowers and the poppies and the sweet alyssum and all the other outrageous green things take in these rains and push themselves up and out, and the pollinators return to bounce among their blooms, then perhaps next spring I will write to someone I love, as Isabella Stewart Gardener once did: “My garden is riotous, unholy, deliriously glorious! I wish you were here.”