Late one afternoon when I was a girl in Louisiana, I went walking in a field with my sister, my dad, and a family friend. The fields were brown, and the unpaved road was dust, and though it was fall, the weather was hot and dry. There was a drought going on. The grown-ups talked about the crop failures, and the threat of fires. They talked about how long the drought was lasting...several years! There was grave concern. Things did not look, smell, or feel normal during the walk through the field. The sun set, fiery red, in a flat empty sky.

And then one day, it began to rain again.