Friday was hot and humid, 96 degrees with 66% humidity for a heat index of 120 degrees. A pop-up thunderstorm appeared that night, dropped a lot of rain and lit up the sky with nonstop lightning and caused a brief power outage, and then just as quickly vanished from the Doppler radar.
This is a typical pattern for this region and this time of year.
However, there's something familiar about it. Not just one day's weather, but the pattern of the summer so far. It's not something I can explain. It's something the "lizard brain" part of my brain is keying on, some instinct that is trying to tell me that we've been here before. Sort of like deja vu, but not quite. More like history repeating itself in a way that's too subtle for me to pick up other than subconsciously.
It feels like the summer of 1996.
If that's the case--if history is repeating itself and 2023 is in the same part of the cycle as 1996--then a major drought is just around the corner.
The drought of 1998-2000 was almost Biblical in scale. By the time late July of 2000 arrived, mature oak trees were dropping their leaves. These were the trees with the deepest roots and which provide constant shade over the ground beneath them, and they can be stubborn about dropping their leaves to the point that some of them linger on the branches throughout winter. For them to start dropping leaves in July is simply unfathomable, but it happened.
For me, it felt like the end of the world. It was dismaying and demoralizing, and I was genuinely worried the region was going to become a desert.
In August of 2000, everything changed. It began to rain that month. Not the quick sprinkle that had occasionally happened during the drought and failed to provide any relief, but a serious rain. And it kept raining for the whole day. And the next day. And the next.
For a whole week, it basically rained nonstop. It would trail off to a drizzle at times, but it never stopped. By the end of that week, the yard was peppered with mushrooms and the whole outdoors smelled like mildew. The drought had broken good and hard, and it was obvious to me at the time. I'm no meteorologist, but I knew it instinctively. It's like when you have a fever and then you suddenly break out in a sweat. You're still weak and sickly feeling, but you know the fever has broken, and you know you've started down the road to normalcy. It was the same way with the drought.
Of course, the local news yokels continued to moan about the drought and the deficit and the lake level and all that. They would pretend the drought was still ongoing for a few more years, actually, even when the lake had reached full pool. But that's tv people for you, I guess.
So now my bones are telling me that this summer is an echo of 1996. If so, then a drought starting in 2025 is what one would expect.
I hope it doesn't happen. I hate droughts, and I loathe the idea of repeating anything from those horrible years of my life.
Add in my fears of economic woes coming to fruition at about the same time, and...
Well, let's just hope we get luckier than we deserve.
