Ninety Degrees.

95 tomorrow, on the first day of June. Summer begins twenty-one days later. 90-something today. 90-something Thursday. The yard's a foot tall because I'm afraid to mow in this heat, lest it burn off to cinders. I'm running the A/C in the building all night just to make it cool enough to sit down at the desk in the mornings. The tomatoes might not set fruit in this kind of weather. The ferns are dead. The dogwood already looks car-crashed. When the breeze blows and the sun's down, you can sit outside. When the breeze quits, you can't. The number of degrees by which my upstairs A/C cannot keep up is directly proportional to how many degrees over 91 it is outside. Today: upstairs thermostat set to 74, upstairs temp at 77. If it's nine in the morning it's already too late to walk the dog. The coneflowers are trying to bloom, but they look distressed. A cat limped across the street this morning. It was trash day on Monday, but it was also Memorial Day, so the neighborhood smells like cooked garbage. All the A/Cs running all through the neighborhood nearly cover the SECU hum. I haven't dumped the pansy pots yet: the plants look microwaved. I was mad all morning and couldn't remember why. AMR wanted to know what in hell was wrong with me. Midafternoon she remembered for both of us, said: you're the only person I know who gets mad at the seasons. Only one season, I said. Still, she said. Yes, I said. It's true.