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Thing of beauty.

Best Storm?

Was that the best storm I've ever seen, never mind in Greensboro? I was front-porched and cocktailed and companied through most of it, so let's sleep on it to decide, shall we? Still: so, so lovely. And well below 70 degrees.

Flat Days.

Hugh's got a series of places he stops when he walks Marley, which is almost always mid-morning, and is in almost every weather but for those days when it's already over 93 or 94, he told me this morning, or when there's ice. He was a paperboy after the Korean war, he said, and ice was the worst. You'd turn the wheel, and you'd think you had it, and then you'd end up in the ditch. All of this from his side of the street—Marley's an Australian cattle dog, and is wary of Maddie—from his seat on the brick wall there in the whatever block of whichever street that is that runs north-south down into the park. I somehow only know the east-west street names over here. I bet Hugh knows them all.

Two nights in a row—Sunday, Monday—big storms built to our west and north, slid right past or through or around without dropping anything on the ground, fired up again on the other side. The tomatoes have quit. The flower garden out front is full of crabgrass. Though we're not quite there yet—if we could get a big storm followed by a cool(er) day, I'd do a little weeding, a little cleanup—we are nearly at the place of giving in and waiting for late September, for jeans and sleeves, for the wholesale turnover that precedes pansies and bulbs.

August. August is deadly. This year's is a slow burn, a creeping version. I have seen worse ones than this, and better, but it remains unmistakeably August. What slight hope attends to such a thing is this: the light's lengthening in the evenings, yellowing, suggesting some other season. The cicadas don't seem to know it, but still. It's happening. I think. I hope.

Agua. Agua.

When we left the house—let's say 8:30 or maybe a few minutes after—we were OK. Even down at the creek we were OK. And everybody wanted to talk about being out early, if 8:30 is early, to beat the heat. Hugh and his dog on the hill. The tennis-skirt fast-walkers in the park. Two older women in knee braces. They wanted to talk about the Toad, too, about his curls, about his pink cheeks. By the time we made the turn down there at the spot where the shade gives out, though, we were edged toward not being so altogether OK, and the dog was dragging, and I was dragging, and the Toad was throwing his water bottle on the ground and yelling agua! agua!, which seemed right, which seemed like at least a thing to yell, if not the thing. Back home the flowers in their pots were already looking bad. It was already too hot to stand in the sun. The porch already looked flattened in all the light. It was 9:15. The only outside I've seen since is the fifteen yards between the back steps and the shed, and it was already so hot that the only thing that made since with all this coffee was the watermelon I cut and refrigerated last night. Here is how I'm pushing back aganst these hotter days: with an idea, like a watermelon or a Tom Collins or the frozen yogurt place over on Lawndale, held out there for the five- or six-o'clock hour. Something to survive until.

The radio says 100 in Raleigh. The government, what's left of it, says an outside chance of something named Emily giving us some piece of some other idea altogether by late weekend. The Toad says agua, agua.

Today's fantasy, which is different from today's hold-on-until-evening idea, which has only a lime involved so far: that first morning—September, is it?—when I open the back door to let the dog out and it's almost crisp, and it smells different, smells less like this and more like that, and the next thing that stumbles through my head is that it'd be a right and noble thing to sit on the steps and drink my coffee there, instead of back inside.

For now I have only this, and TLK to thank for it: As the sun bakes its way across the front of my building, I now know what those ticks and pings are—it's the siding expanding in the sudden heat. TLK's got cedar on his folly, too, and told me recently over a quick patch of afternoon drywall and a cold beer in a can that he listens out for it in the mornings, the pop and snap of the building breathing. Now I do, too. And maybe it won't be a lime this afternoon, after all. Maybe a cold beer. Maybe a good new piece of information to go alongside. One more way to measure how we make it through the days, and with what degree of success.

August Arrives.

I'm not going to use a word like bearable, but we've slid back some from last week's apocalypse, and now it's just hot. Don't worry, though, Tea Partiers. We'll be back at hell's doorstep tomorrow, when it's supposed to be 99. As for today, though—as for the second day of August, an August that for these two days has not been what the Pyrrhic last days of July was/were—there is a breeze. It is hot, but I do not want to commit homicide. The yard's greened up from the weekend's rain. The sedum is sending up long bloom stalks. This is not bearable, but we may somehow yet survive.

Still, I dream of autumn.

We here at ANYLF know that what you most need from us in a time of crisis is news, and so here's what's breaking: there is a wasp loose out here in the writing shed, and I have no container with which to capture it. It's settled into the gable-end window, too, so I've also got no ladder with which to get up there and not capture it with the container I don't have. I could pour the coffee out, but I've been doing the math, and the numbers make it look like I'd rather get stung. Well, Jim, that does it for our top stories. Let's send it over to Monty with the weather.

It's hot, Jim and Marlee, but not quite as hot as it has been. It's possible it'll never rain again, but we'll deal with that tomorrow. I'd use another sentence with a conjoining conjunction, but that'd be bad form. When we come back, we'll have your seven-day up on the big board. Jim? Back to you.

What Blooms.

All this and it is not August: We went several days last week and this where it felt like 100 even if it didn't make it there, where the upstairs A/C had all it could do to keep the upstairs below eighty in those late afternoon and early evening hours. And oh holy hell the stillness—I'd be out before nine to walk the dog and the Toad, and there'd be nothing moving but the mockingbirds, the heat in the shade different only from the heat in the sun by a degree or two. It was stiller still down in the park, impossibly, the bowl of heat and humidity pooling and bottoming there by the creek.

These last two-and-some days, though, storms. Saturday we had storms everywhere but here. Sunday we walked out back to let the Toad listen to the thunder—a noise he will make if asked—and lightning struck somewhere between here and the big road, scared us all sufficiently back indoors to cry briefly and then watch it rain hard enough to overflow the gutters. (Waves, the Toad signed, pointing at the rain. Certainly close enough, we said.) Yesterday, more rain. Which means: the upstairs can catch back up, and we can sleep chilly. Which means: mornings find us so humid you can nearly watch the grass grow. I've not mowed the lawn in two weeks or more. Last weekend it was a field of cinders. Now it's knee-high.

What's blooming is black-eyed Susan, vinca, petunia, and the cosmos reseeding in their beds. What's not: any of the tomatoes I had such medium hopes for. Our food crops have all but packed it in. Maybe we can spend August eating pretty instead of eating fruit. I hear that'll carry you through.

You want forecast? Each day the same until it's not. Mid-nineties. Chance of a storm or not. Chance of that storm actually making it here or not. High, high heat. High summer. Last week I got a flannel shirt catalog in the mail that damn near reduced me to tears. I woke up this morning fantasizing about gray winter days. We could be ninety days or more away from frost or freeze. It is not even August. It will not even be August tomorrow. Or the day after. We have a ways to go.

On Hiatus.

It has been shockingly, devastatingly, blast-furnace hot. Sometimes it has rained. Right now, though, oddly and in the dead center of July, it is cool enough to have the windows open and listen to the train. The tomatoes are dying, but there's not much to be done other than eat what yield we did see, celebrate those few good fortunes. The yard's growing tall. The mower's on the fritz. The flowers out front are mulched in and the crabgrass is attempting a comeback all the same. Speaking of comebacks: ANYLF will attempt one in this very space when we return from a half-week of taking The Toad to Florida to show him what that part of the Atlantic looks like. It's been a long hot summer, says old Robert Earl Keen. Time to go on the road and then come back again.

Five July.

Well, it stormed on the Fourth, as I believe it always does here in 2740X, though I know that in actual real Farmer's Almanac terms we're only batting about .400. Still. I remember no time before living in NC, and I remember no time that's not colored by grad school on Carr Street, and I remember no Carr Street BBQ not colored by apocalyptic rain and bourbon passed in pint bottles and god only knows what else, and so I am happy to report here in this space that though this 4th there was no Carr Street, no fast-hung tarp, no street bowling, no bourbon, even, there was still and yes rain, serious rain, even, and we grilled corn in the pre-rain and ate it in the post-rain, and, well, though this summer has been lax and even irresponsible, there was weather, a hard rain herein reported, and being that this is the forecast, we do now report the events of yesterday, and of the day before, and we say thusly: It has been bad. Very bad. Hot like an example. Concrete like another example. And yet I feel a subtle though sure slide toward something that looks like five fewer degrees, a bit more rain, and surely a better chance of same. No news from NYC. Dying tomatoes, yielding tomatoes. Corn in a cast-iron skillet. Ice in a glass here as we leak into the first week of July. Braves winning ballgames. An A/C that hangs on. A lawnmower that wants for a professional opinion. I've gone crazy. I don't know past the fact that it may rain what the week's weather may hold. That's the best I can give you. Thank god we don't run a subscription service around here. We watch the sky. We say it'll never rain. We pray for rain.