Solstice, Anew.

EJO arrives at his first solstice eighteen days old, the toad man, maker of toad noises. He is the Toad. There is no middle ground with the Toad: you love him, or you want to put him down the insinkerator. Or maybe there is a middle ground: you want both.

It is summer. I want to say it's high summer, say that we had dinner on the porch with friends, but only half of that is true. High summer is July, is early August. Our friends were here, and Venus hung low enough in the sky to explain it to their kids, but it is the first day of a long summer, in the middle of a stretch of hot and dry and still, though we did find a gift breeze while we ate and the kids ran the lawn. Our kid slept, threw one arm out to the side, sweated. These sentences run on too long, have too many clauses, too many commas. This is how it goes in the age of the Toad. This is how it went before, too, friends and fans of saying things like friends and fans.

We may see weather overnight. There are eight brand-new hand-built roof trusses tarped in the driveway. The dog has her summer shave. The Toad sleeps and eats. Sometimes we feel terribly alone. Other times, the calendar shows us we've not once been alone the whole time. Somebody build us a temple in the back yard, please, that will shine tonight's setting sun right down the middle of the square. It is the solstice. Find some way to mark it. If not with a stone city, then with some other way. Any other way, even if it is chicken pie and margaritas and amped-up kids and one more night where the Toad lives and we live and the bats come out from wherever they live and the whole damn thing wheels along like it always, always has.