The wind tore through the pines rushing and whistling as it tossed the branches about.

Lannae crouched closer to the trunk and pulled her rain poncho hood further over her face. The rain poured down filtered by the pine fronds into a steady sprinkle that rat-tapped on her head. She had been taking soil and water samples in the lower NY State reserve to see if the acid had continued to leach the land and sicken the trees upon it.
Since the great world economic crash of the late 1900's the feeble attempts to save the environment had fallen to the stark economic necessity that business leaders claimed governed their decisions. Lannae's mother had always told her she thought the great collapse had been engineered by these same business interests who had slipped through the collapse unscathed. To them it was just business as usual with a cheaper, more desperate crop of workers. She had been a college professor until the Great Collapse when to support her young daughter she scrubbed floors and washed dishes for many years, until she died not long before Lannae got a position in a college which took charity students. Lannae still had her mother's writings which she continued to work on until her death.

They were a careful analysis and search for evidence that late in the 20th century certain forces in the economic sector had forced legislators, who didn't understand basic economics, to rush balancing the budget of the old USA. As all other economies were collapsing around it, the USA held a debt that served as the last prop on the world economy. While certainly it needed to be lowered in a timely manner, when the rush to drop the debt caused key industries to fail, it lead to the final collapse of the world economy. The second great depression of the 20th century had started. This was to the benefit of certain international holding companies which liquidated huge debts at the cost of great suffering to many people. Labor and environmental laws had fallen in the face of people's desperation. Lannae's mother had spent the rest of her life documenting her theories about the key perpetrators of such a global catastrophe.

Lannae had grown up never belonging to the world she was in. In her childhood she was the child of an educated mother in a world of poverty and degradation. The other children made fun of her good grades, proper manners, and her mother's plans for her. They expected no more than a survival job in one of the great polluting factories and bitterly attacked everyone who had aspirations beyond such a bleak life. She had learned to stand alone or at least to hold to the values her mother had taught her. She was used to keeping her own company and seldom felt the need to socialize. Her refuge was books and an escape to nature.

Later when her mother died and her grades and poverty got her into a college as a charity case, she stood alone once again separate from her wealthy companions with their independent incomes and unfettered free time. She worked in the school kitchen to get extra money for books and clothing waiting on her wealthy classmates who avoided her glance, and spoke to her only as much as was socially necessary without being rude. Once again her refuge was her books and nature. She walked the beautiful college grounds with wonderment, and read the books of the late 1700 and 1800's with great sympathy as the circumstances of the heros and heroines so matched her own. She was fascinated at how much the world had returned to that time. She decided to study ecology in the hopes of somehow rekindling the interest and knowledge of the environment and its systems that had been pushed aside this last generation. It was her testament to the memory of her mother.

So now she sat as the rain poured down and thought of the long hard effort that had brought her here. Her input and contributions were so seldom welcome in the academic setting however accurate, that she focused mostly on research, hoping that like Darwin she would build such a huge body of evidence that it would stand of its own mass.

"...And the water dripped down around her like her dreams..."

Pieces of a song floated through her mind. She shook away the wistfulness and watched the rain cascade through the branches. It was strange to think that it was loaded with acid and was slowly burning away the streams and rivers and finally the plants on the earth and people were unaware of it going on all around them.

or perhaps it was:

The wind tore through the pines rushing and whistling as it tossed the branches about.

Lannae crouched closer to the trunk and pulled her rain poncho hood further over her face. The rain poured down filtered by the pine fronds into a steady sprinkle that rat-tapped on her head. She arranged the organically grown cellulose so the rain didn't drip on her nose. As soon as the rain slowed, she walked back to her cabin. The rain poured off the solar collectors and gushed down the sides of the wooden cabin. It splashed in an almost cheery fashion on to the many potted plants she had hanging off the eaves. Cascades of reds and pinks and blues and yellows, the flowers danced in the rain. Lannae smiled to herself. She straightened the lid on the recycling bin as she walked in the door and patted the cat as he hopped off the lid to run inside.

The fire had just started to die out in the small stove Lannae and her husband used to supplement the solar gain from the south side windows. Their row of half size black tanks used to hold heat over night were considered old fashioned, but they liked the look and they were cheap. Her mother had built the cabin as a retreat from the pressures of academic life. She was a renowned economist who had been one of several who had successfully lead the people through the economic maze to recognize that the USA was simply a part of a world economy. She helped guide the world from the brink of the next great depression, and to recognize that all the world's economies were inextricably linked. If one fell the rest would follow, and if one succeeded the rest could benefit. She pointed out that the world had no choice but to cooperate with one another for the benefit of all.

Lannae munched on an apple and typed some data idly into her electric note pad. She walked over pulled a switch to let energy from the wind plant to flow into the storage batteries. They had plenty of power from their old fashioned hybrid system, but guests often made fun of it. Lannae would laugh and point out the whole world was a hybrid system. The people in the developing world had not fallen into the error of great utility companies which had been an artifact of the Great Economic Depression and poor storage and collection of energy in the earlier part of the century. With the great bulk of the earth's people living in the tropics independent solar units for power and water ran most of the world. Lannae's mother pointed out that they made good use of the knowledge gained from European and American mistakes to start fresh and clean as they developed their economies. "They saved the world," her mother would quote often to her students as she lectured.

Faintly conscious of all this, Lannae put her samples in the spectrometer for study. So far the results had been good. Acid in rain had been slowly declining as the world's atmosphere cleaned itself. Global warming had slowed substantially. Lannae was documenting this progress, which though slow was progressing. As fossil fuels were used less and less, it memory of the bad old days slipped from consciousness much like the memories of Old London's polluted coal fire fogs. She smiled to herself as she worked. The cat purred near her. She tapped some music on the player.

"...And the water dripped down around her like her dreams..."

She smiled as content as her cat and worked happily away into the night.

or perhaps it was:

The wind tore through the pines rushing and whistling as it tossed the branches about.

Lannae crouched closer to the trunk, and licked her left foot carefully. She twitched her antennae and scuttled off through the leaves towards the wreck of a cabin. The bones were almost dust. The remains of the great plague wars lay about the planet in great piles where cities had once stood. Lannae was a healthy young cockroach. She lived well on the remains of the cabin. She scuttled happily through wreckage and finally scooted into her den. She slept happily as the rain poured down.

or perhaps:

Since all points exist simultaneously, they all were equally true. Simply a choice of direction...

copy right 2003 Lili Pintea-Reed