Blank Days.

Everywhere but here, apparently, though if last night's 10 pm-er and subsequent 2 am-er are any indication, just hang on. Things may change, and for the tomatoed better.

It is not, friends and fans of weather, that I have not been pining away for a rain gauge, a hygrometer, a seven-day. It is not that I haven't been keeping a close watch on the azalea I planted (not by plan) in a leach field of fist-sized gravel, thereby insuring excellent drainage but also insuring excellent drainage, good in all months but these. It is not that I've not been five-gallon-bucketing water that azalea's way, and also to the new cherry, the pots out front, the new coneflowers, the old coneflowers, the black-eyed susans. It is not that I've not been checking the radar.

But somehow this year the season has hit me too squarely, has jumped full into high summer without any real early summer, without any lingering late spring. This morning, though, in bright hot sunshine on the porch, it smelled both like brutal summer and like last night's good rain, and I thought—I remembered—that this is the sort of thing I've promised at least to record. Contradiction. Confusion. Something other than the blank page of a late-June ninety-degree day. Something other than that high blank sky. Something a little less blank. And I have been feeling blank. And the weather has for the most part been a string of blank pressing days. But not last Saturday night, up in the half-high mountains of Asheville, eating dinner outside. And not yesterday, mowing the back lawn with a dying mower out in front of what I hoped would be rain. And not overnight, in either of those good storms. And not this morning. And not even now, with these uncovered windows letting heat through the glass and into the western side of the house, and with the radar lit so hopefully. So I let rainwater into the gas can and may have wounded the walk-behind. So the Toad's upstairs refusing to take the second nap of the day. So I wait and wait for letters or phone calls from the gods of my own choosing, for better or worse, that either will or will not come regardless of the quality of my waiting. I am strung between days. Best, then, to go back to that which we know we can only guess at: the radar sure looks like it really maybe might rain, if we get lucky.