The Daily: 19 December 2023

Today is the Festival of Ops, the Opalia. Ops was the consort of Saturn. She may have been associated with fertility at some point; her holidays are tied to grain harvesting. But she is better known for presiding over abundance more generally. Her name gives us the word “opulence”, which pretty much sums up how the Romans celebrated her day. This is a day of excess.

I am not fond of excess… in any case, today we are again in recovery mode in Vermont. We have the opposite excess problem here. Once again, over 6″ of rain fell in under 24 hours. Here is what that looks like in my part of the world.

My son’s town has flaky dams all around it. So they evacuated and he’s here at my house for the night. Two of our bank branches are flooded… again. The Mad River is in flood stage, and the Winooski is close. My town has closed off downtown. This morning I drove to work through a white landscape. This afternoon when everything closed (early), there was little snow left. So all that melt is added to the rainfall. There are several reported mudslides, and I saw numerous trees that had just fallen over because the ground was too saturated to hold them upright on a slope. (This is why the flaky dams are a concern tonight…)

I guess we should be happy this wasn’t snow. We’d be buried under 6 feet.

But my garage wouldn’t be flooded…

And snow would feel a lot more like Midwinter than cold, muddy rain…

---

©Elizabeth Anker 2023