6.4 Billion Raindrops

At 4 o'clock in the morning, it is raining hard. I listen to the drumming on the roof. I hear the sound of water dripping everywhere. Icicles fall from the trees. Streams are opening in the snow. The thaw is here! It keeps me awake.
"The earth is 4.6 billion years old." I repeat it like a mantra. "4.6 billion years." 4.6 billion thaws. 4.6 billion orbits around the sun. 4.6 billion solstices and equinoxes. 4.6 billion.
Tick tock. Tick tock.
Oxygen made its appearance 2.5 billion years ago. The first invertebrates swam in seas unknown to us 505 million years ago and then disappeared 66 million years later. And then insects came and diasappeared. So did amphibians, reptiles, conifers and dinosaurs. Birds and plants. All came and went. 65 million years ago an asteroid collided with the earth and everything weighing over seventy-seven pounds died. That would be me. And then around 55 million years ago, the first two-legged creatures walked. 2 million years ago the supervolcano at Yellowstone blew and buried New York state in sixty-seven feet of ash. Life comes and life goes. There is no new thing under the sun. Tick tock. Tick tock.
I turn over. The rain still drums. Ancient ice cores tells us that before the industrial revolution two hundred years ago there were abut 280 parts per million of carbon in our atmosphere. A hundred years later, there were 315 parts per million. Today, there are 350 parts per million. Fewer than 4 out of every 10,000 molecules of air are carbon dioxide. The CO2 that you just exhaled will be in the atmosphere for years and will travel the breadth of the planet. Methane will cause 16 to 17 percent of global warming. It comes from farts and belches. Nitrous oxide, laughing gas, is 270 times more efficient at trapping heat than CO2. It stays in the atmosphere 150 years. Tick tock. Tick tock.
The rain falls. The water runs. The icicles drip. It is spring! The woods I sleep in tonight were not here when my father was born. The coyotes that I track are immigrants. The beaver ponds I walk have been created in my lifetime. The only constant is change. There is no new thing under the sun. The earth is 4.6 billion years old and it is raining hard. Tick tock. Tick tock.