Early falling leafs
Last Mid-August, many of the broad-leafed trees near my apartment windows were bright green. It was after all, midsummer time.
But this year, even though the weather was not very cold, the leaves were falling starting Mid-August. When I look out the window on 4th September around 3PM - as I write this memoir, it was a very sad sight for the trees. All the leaves have fallen and any that are still attached, are turned yellow. It looks like it’s holding on for its dear life even if the leaves are all turned yellow. Many of the leaves tips have turned yellow, but still barely give out faint green color. I think it is because of the severe drought that had hit us.
This kind of occurrence is not only happening to the apartment where I reside. Whenever I go out to exercise, I notice all the broadleaved trees and evergreen trees all turning yellow and dying out. TV news broadcast stated that for the 5th year California was suffering from drought and that there are thousands and thousands of trees dying out as we speak! There were over twice as much forest fire occurring from the heat, and over 9million acres of forests were burned. Several fire fighters had perished, and many of the houses had burned, leaving many casualties in it’s awake.
Out of the entire nation of United States, California has the most power in finance. It is ranked 7th in the production total from the global and the nation alone. The area I reside, Silicon Valley is the Mecca of technology. Yahoo, Apple, Google, Hewett Packard (HP), IBM, Cisco, Facebook etc. many hundreds and thousands of well known technology is in here. Whenever a summit meeting happens here, many of the visitors always visit this economy capital. Southern California has the origins of movies – Hollywood. There is the Disneyland, tour sites, and countless places to have fun and games.
However despite the technology, fun and sightseeing isn’t all that good either. There is a strong divide in the poor and rich. The housing prices are super high and rising. A 2 bedroom house easily costs $2,500. San Francisco’s carefree culture does not need any explanations. San Francisco has a protection law for the illegal immigrants; there is no difficulty for many to come in. Even though it is the 3rd most beautiful harbor, and has the graceful Golden Gate Bridge, there is a cut on the tourist business because of homeless people. Along with that, the right for Gay Marriage has been passed as a law – where it all started is where I reside, Northern California.
The governor being concerned of the severe water shortage asked the citizens to decrease the water usage by 1/3rd so I try my best to cut the usage of water. However advanced the culture is, however smart, intelligent and full, comfortable life has become, if there is drought – all heads in wrong direction. If there is no water, no faming, and if a company cannot run with enough people, it would move to another city or worse, close it all down.
There is a hope for this winter. Since the El Nino is passing, there would be a ton of rain to be expected. But having the rain come isn’t the way to solve it all the problems. Weather experts say that this winter’s rainfall wouldn’t be the only solution. It is difficult in the situation that we are in.
The soil in this area happens to be very soft and whenever there is severe rain, there is avalanche. Near San Francisco Bay is the city of Alviso. It always gets flooded from rain. Even if the rain would come in torrents, it would not be enough to soak up to the soil below. It would just severely scratch the surface and pass. If the rain would steadily come and go every year, then would the rain soak into the water and feed into the trees healthily.
When I went to my daughter’s place last week, my daughter told me that she wanted to give the fruit trees some water, and in order for the water to collect, so I had made dirt walls. The fruit trees started to dry out, and much less compared to last year, only about 10 or so apples were on trees and about 2 of them were in the ground. I think it was from the shortage of water. To save up for water, the pipeline that connected to the trees that gave water automatically daily was cut off. I took a small hoe to till and saw that only dusts were flying. After getting a lot of dirt on my face, I used a small hose to water the ground, the dry ground took the water endlessly.
Since the water usage for farm was shortened, there would be shortage in farm produce, less fruits etc; there would be a raise in the prices. Meteorologists all agree that from human greed, it destroyed the nature and would continue to do so. Even if several scientists warn that in about a century, an inevitable calamity would strike the humanity but who would listen to that? As humans are always locked to the greed and comfort that is only in front of them at the moment, we would only dig our hole deeper into the end.
(September 4th, 2015)
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The pair of Geese that left… 
Early falling leafs