The long haul

Penore is in it for the long haul. She is old and plans on being much, much older. Global coolings and global warmings have come and gone and cycled through again.

***

To humans, keeping the Sahara a desert and making sure that the ice in Antartica never melts is the only way to feel safe. If anything changes then we must be committing some kind of sin and the gods are punishing us.

***

Penore sees things a little differently. To her the earth is always changing. She remembers when the Sahara was a savana and when Antartica held wonderful animal and plant life. Some of our legends, including dragons are buried under all that ice. And Penore would like to see it uncovered again and as such is one of the few that is actually rooting for global warming.

***

But she is worried. What is worrying her are the disinfectants that claim to kill 99.94% of germs. That means that only the meanest nastiest ones survive. And when they divide and multiply the germ population becomes meaner and nastier. Kind of like if a plague wiped out humanity and left only people who were isolated in prisons and asylums. And then that generation of criminals locked up their meanest and looniest people and the plague once again knocked off everyone outside and so on for 100's of generations. 

***

She is not sure what to do. She is used to being able to add a little something here or there to "turn the tide". You know, dislodge just the right pebble that starts a landslide that takes down half a mountain and causes the pressure on the lava below to be reduced leading to a massive volcano at just the right latitude to heat up the planet a little in just the right places.

She is currently working on getting rid of Panama. Ever since Central America pushed its way onto the Pacific tectonic plate the flow between the two great oceans has stopped and that has caused a cycle of ice ages that has become rather bothersome.

***

Her plan started with the Panama canal - a whisper in just the right ears got the little strip of water now between the oceans. The next phase involves widening and deepening so that the water will actually flow between the oceans and begin to even out the salt concentrations which, of course, will produce more moderate temperatures world wide.

***

She won't say who's ears she is whispering into but when I ask her about it certain pictures come to mind: the person whose ears she whispers into has some kind of uniform and the computer screens in the eyes next to the whispered ears are looking at the earth from a place where the wind don't blow.

***

But Penore is stumped about the germs. They are so small and so many and they multiply so fast that there doesn't seem to be any "pebbles" that will turn this tide. So she sits and ponders and worries. Germs... germs... germs.... not to mention viruses - but don't get her started!!!

Snow, up to a Fae's knees

The Faes finally made it onto the fence. I hurriedly put the gates onto the arbor just before it snowed. I was concerned that I would not be able to put them on without a little bit of shoveling.

My daughter and her husband as well as his folks were coming in for Christmas and aside from the fact that I had promised myself I would finish by Christmas, I wanted them to see the faes on the gates in their natural habitat (as opposed to the garage benches).

I was correct about the shoveling. I was not correct about the little bit. Below is a picture of the gates the next day, after the blizzard. My daughter's inlaws made it as far as the hotel room and there they were trapped as we all anxiously waited to see if the young couple would make it to DIA from their layover in Las Vegas.

They did not. They had to stay the night in Vegas (I can think of worse places to be stuck but those places would probably have been cheaper for them). The next day they drove a rented car to the house as I spent the time trying to get a way in and out of the driveway. One of the disadvantages of being the only house on the block is that if a path is going to be made, we have to make it.

So we had a white Christmas and the Faes spent their first day outside wondering if they were going to be covered by a glacier for eons to come.

Not that that would particularly upset them. Aside from the time-keeper, Sheneal, the other faes have there own methods of playing with time.


For us to survive an ice age (or wait out a global warming "horror") we would have to live out every day between now and the time when everything turned back to "normal".


For the faes the task is much simpler. That is if you consider stepping into a parallel universe simple. The only real problem that they have with this popping in and out is that sometimes they pop back seconds before they left. A fae trapped in that way pops back into herself just as she is leaving again, and again, and again....


I had a similar experience this holiday season with the shoveling. As soon as I got down to the end of the drive, it was time to start over again. I almost took back all of my presents to put a down payment on a snow blower. But that would have required getting out of the driveway to get to the store. And I could not get out of the driveway, so back to the snow shoveling I went.


You might be wondering how a fae escapes such a loop-back event. It takes about 8 faes (no, this is not the joke about how many faes it takes to change a light bulb - although that is a funny one!). A fae has to pop out of this universe just after the trapped fae's point of departure and then pop back in just before the trapped faes return, all the while extending a hand to the trapped fae.


Of course this traps the second fae. So a third fae envelopes the second, extending her arm. And so on with faes 4 through 8. Around fae 8, sometimes 7, there is enough time between return and departure to push off into (and out of) another time. They all clasp hands, the eighth fae pushes off forming a kind of whip that snaps the original trapped fae into at least three additional universes before she finally rolls to a stop, far from the tiny worm hole.


BTW, nowadays, all faes travel in pairs (binds, they are called) and rescues are never attempted without a ninth fae even though it doesn't take 9 to do the trick. All young faes are told stories about the "Lost 8". It was long ago and no one is certain if it is a fairy tale or if it is false. But 8 faes are in the books and no record of them can be found after a certain point in time. Some young faes ask if they might someday pop back, but the suggestion is simply shrugged off because many have looked deep in the future and it does not happen.