Smoke-drift from the Canadian Fires casts an eerie, orange-red glow over the Farm.  Moon travels the night sky as a ball of fire; Sunset carries hints of the apocalypse.  What’s more, a serious drought has settled upon us.  The shallow spring that waters the livestock has already dropped below its lowest level from last Summer.  I had put off measuring until yesterday.  Less than two feet of water left.  Just a month ago the spring was overflowing, the water-table near ground level.  And then the Rains stopped coming.  There is a second well here at the Farm, just behind the old Farmhouse, which sits near the crest of the land.  When I moved onto the Farm a bit over a year ago, I found the upper well only by parting a thick tangle of vines.  A bucket and a rope still hung there.  From what I can tell, the Old Man drew his drinking water by lowering and raising that bucket, until the day he didn’t wake from his sleep.  The well has not been drawn from in two decades.  Last Spring, a neighbor told me that this was rumored to be one of the deepest hand-dug, stone-lined wells in the area—seventy-five feet, by his recollection.  My measurement finds the bottom at about sixty feet, but the miracle of the thing shines regardless of the number.  How in the heck did they do it?  A sixty-foot-deep hole dug into the ground, lined with a dry-laid stone wall three feet thick, trying to fill with cold water the whole time.  This week I will work to drop a pump down into this old marvel, all the while fumbling to remember how to pray for Rain.  As I gather toward the story’s telling, I am wondering what it looks like to turn and face the past in a time of cascading ecological and social troubles. But first, this week’s

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