July harvest

When I look back at this on a cold, gray February day, will it erase the memory of 30 days over 90 degrees so far, with a whole other month or two to go?

No.

Birds, coming back

Next year I’m going to try to notice when the birds stop singing in the morning. Some days, in the dead of winter, are there no bird sounds at all?

They’ve come back now. It sounds like spring. Even the light on the snow looks a little bit like spring: a mounded-up snow pile drenched-in-cold-rain sort of spring.

Other people are happy about this. I love spring too, but in its good time. A big snowstorm, as my daughter observed the other day, helps us give up our illusion that we can control nature. We curl up inside, make a fire. The storm gives us permission to read a book, or take a nap.

In spring, there’s the garden to turn over, seeds to plant, exerting our will on nature all over again.

I like the birds and the light, but my will to control is still resting. I’m hoping for more snow on Thursday.

Heat wave!

On hot nights my mother put a fan in the hall outside our bedrooms. It felt like it would never reach my door, turning so slowly on its big black base (and why couldn’t each of us have had our own fan? Were they so expensive then?). I’d lie in bed waiting for it to shudder on one side, pausing for what seemed like forever at my brother’s room; wait again for it to turn back around, past my parents’ room; and then, finally, I’d struggle to feel the faint breeze that never quite reached my bed.

And yet when I moved to Philadelphia people thought I was crazy because I felt sad when heat waves ended.

I’m over that. But I still love weather: thunderstorms and hail and Canadian highs and rainy days and hurricanes and blizzards. Weather punctuates our lives, like little exclamation marks.

The Dog Days

It’s kind of a nice idea, that the heat at this time of year is due to the brightest star in the sky rising and setting with the sun; and that the ancient Romans called the days of this conjunction caniculares dies because this star, Sirius, is in the constellation Canis Major.

They begin today, by old English tradition; or on July 6, says The Book of Common Prayer (weighing in on this important matter for some reason); or July 23 or 24 in ancient Rome; all of which points to I really must get over my obsession with dates.

And also, if you look at a star chart, Sirius these days doesn’t track with the sun at all; and if you want to impress someone as you’re drinking your G&T on one of these days, tell them about how it’s all  because of the precession of the equinoxes.