As was predicted, Saturday was insanely hot. Mr. T kept checking the temperature map, which reached 47.3 degrees in the middle of Melbourne. I didn’t even step outside of the house until about 2pm, when I realised the vege garden was flat to the ground – you couldn’t even call it wilting. The wind was fiercely hot and stinging and huge eddies of leaves and dust and sticks were gusting around our street and our house. We left at around 4pm to visit friends, driving towards the east. We were detoured off a major freeway due to a spot fire burning and smoke shrouding the road. When we finally reached them, we found them in their pool – “wear shoes!” they yelled at us, because their glass-topped outdoor table had shattered in the heat earlier in the day. We spent the night in the pool or watching movies, after the cool change came through. We drove home. It rained, lightly, in the night.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I realised that further east, the state was burning fiercely and is still burning now. The death toll keeps rising and is now over 100. The animals in the thousands of hectares of burnt forest will remain uncounted. What can you do? We will donate money and we will donate blood, but what can you do, really?
The Grey Cat on our drought-stricken lawn, far away from danger.
