Little Prayer.

Items of note: (a) the man down in the park doing something to his yard with cinder blocks is, it finally seems, building some kind of water feature/waterfall/creek/pond, and (b) at the U-Haul place out by the puppet show, someone had very gently and with great purpose backed his U-Haul trailer fully down into a gravel drainage ditch. About each of these—salmon river, rental fiasco—there was much standing around and considering by the parties involved. I drove by each with the requisite care and radius.

ANYLF comes to you on one more criminally sunny breezy day in a string of criminally sunny breezy days, the grass in the medians and in my backyard so crisp one believes it's never rained, it'll never rain again, that rain, for the Toad, will appear only in books, if we still have books. Coke used to cost fifty cents, we'll tell him. And there was rain.

It's hot. It's ninety every day. The only thing keeping the top of my head pasted on is that it cools into each evening with a kind of deliberateness, like even the gods know this is too much, that we need a bone thrown once and again. The poplars are throwing off leaves. The walnuts are yellowing. The dogwoods are hanging on, but not in a way that gives you any hope that any of this might end well. I've had a bag of charcoal in the bed of my truck for almost a month, and I'm sure it's still good to use. I haven't mown my lawn in September, and can't remember when in August I might have done it, though I'm sure I must have. We are tinderbox dry. We are about as dry as I have known it. And still, somehow, the plague of mosquitoes hangs on. Maybe they're huddling for the night down the hill in the water feature. Who knows.

I wouldn't put a fake stream in my yard, but plenty of folks wouldn't have glued a bathroom onto their storage buildings, either, so let me not cast the first cinder block. Good luck down there, Mister Man. May your riverbed either leak or not leak—whatever those things are supposed to do, I hope yours does it. May your rented trailer land exactly where you mean for it to, each and every time.