Watch the grass grow

On a spring day three years ago, the river climbed out of its banks. Unseasonable heat and heavy rain had hit the snowpack high in the mountains, sending a winter’s worth of meltwater in a pulse down the tributaries, into the mainstem, and spilling across the valley floor. Work seemed unlikely under these circumstances, so I visited the flood instead. In the park, the river wrapped its arms around cottonwood trunks and overtopped the grass in gentle, reaching puddles. I watched the river push up in roiling parabolas against bridge piers, then drove to the thin riffle where it dashed across the highway. I stopped at a friend’s property, where the river filled swales and ran through the garden and lapped just short of the house’s back stairs. “It’s the Everglades,” my friend said, as we stood on the porch surveying all that mirrored water. Inside, my friend’s teenage daughter showed me into the bathroom, where she was fostering seven kittens. She placed the smallest—a gray fluff of a…