tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90060739985904551442024-02-07T14:35:04.635-05:00and now, your local forecast(a barometer of sorts.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger876125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-89072576571199466822013-03-05T10:43:00.002-05:002013-03-05T10:43:17.044-05:00Early Spring.Oh, the snowstorm that couldn't. Or wouldn't. We're due now for heavyish rain, semichilly temps. It's Virginia that's due for breathless side-of-the-road local newsmageddon. All of us are supposed to see mid-fifties by the weekend, though, so none of any of this probably matters too, too much.<br />
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The wrens are nearly finished moving into the front porch mailbox. The Bradford pears at The Toad's school are budding out. I'm typing this one-handed with a 24-day-old baby sleeping in my other arm. Forsythia. Crocus. Mockingbirds chasing each other power line to gutter and back again.<br />
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I'm trying to head out back to light one more little fire before we turn too warm for that sort of thing. I'd sing a sad song about having somehow lost this last month or so of cold weather if I weren't just as eager for that first warm front porch morning, coffee in the wooden chair, smell of things blooming, light westerly breeze—<br />
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Heavy-headed committee members. That's what Sandra Alcosser, in her lovely poem "In Case of Rapture This Taxi Will Explode," calls tulips in a bud vase. Those daffodils out back bring that line to mind this morning. "With what sharp pleasure I would welcome company into my life," she says at the end, or something very near that.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-86145500646252709742013-03-03T22:53:00.003-05:002013-03-03T22:53:51.039-05:00Snowbound Lament.It's chilly out there, is what it is. The Sunday Roast has come and gone, a quick filet that was only a little on fire for only a little while, a baked potato, a little steamed broccoli. If the kid is intent on killing you, go simple: Red meat, red wine. Various dinner-table bubble-bath bargains. Be finished with it all, get the big one to bed, get the wee one sleeping on the sofa next to his sleeping mom, pour a drink, put on the hi-fi, clean the kitchen, check the weather.<br />
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The fancies say rain on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. The geeks you've been following since January, the guys with fancy computers and angry semi-grammatical facebook pages, say a foot of snow in that same timeframe. The thing: they've been right three times in a row. Do you want to be socked in with a manic toddler, pissed about his brother's arrival on the planet? No. No no and no. But: can you still be you and not hope for cataclysm, for that selfsame foot of snow, for a power outage and the need to move the whole family to the woodstoved shed?<br />
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This is the lament of the new father, second verse—I no longer know for sure what to hope for. What I did do: take the problem child to the grocery, buy eggs and milk and bread. If this thing comes true, I'll already have it, won't have to fight the lines. Though, damn, I love the lines, always have. I love Christmas Eve at the bookstore, and I love the night before a storm at the grocery. I like needing a carton of milk but not needing to panic. I like being near all that odd, misplaced fear.<br />
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So bring on the snow. Or don't. It's March. We'll either bloom the rest of these daffodils or we'll pile snow into the bog garden that is the backyard. Or, hell, we'll do both. The fancies, regardless of forecast, want sixties for next week. If the geeks and the fancies both are right, we'll probably hatch mosquitoes in the snowdrifts—and if that's not enough apocalypse for you, then I've got a three-week-old baby and a fairly, though hopefully temporarily, damaged Toad you can borrow until you're satisfied.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-72381459246557831962013-03-01T09:35:00.004-05:002013-03-01T09:37:35.662-05:00Next Time.The next time we do this—though, friends and fans of both weather and human husbandry, there will be no next time—we'll try not to do a deathly ill toddler in newborn week three. Finally got it figured out last night: croup with a bonus round of ear infection, which explained the comeback of the fever, and now The Toad is tanked on antibiotics and Advil and is <i>at school for the first time in a week.</i> A week. I love that kid, but I'm not sure I've ever been happier to not have him here. The house is a sitcom set of what a house would look like if the week we just experienced had actually happened. There are stray crumbs from meals I'm not sure we ever ate. Yogurts from another time. Spoons that may never come clean. Burp cloths. Swaddle blankets. Single shoes.<br />
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But there's crap coffee coming ready in the machine, and the sun is out, and the kid is mainly healed and uncontagious, and the baby's asleep upstairs and as yet immune, and I can come to you and say the hardwoods are starting to bud and bloom, which is my favorite sign of spring. Subtle. Quiet. Reddish hues in the stands of trees on 70 on the way to the puppet show. Early fruit trees are going at the elementary school out there, plums, or maybe some cherry variant, but it's the maples I like best, those undersized signs and signals out at the branch tips. Soon, the showy stuff: Japanese magnolias, dogwoods. But this moment—daffodils and the grass not greening but signalling that it might—this moment I love.<br />
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Possible snow this weekend. Possible snow midweek next week. But spring's coming. I found a few leaves in the mailbox. If the wrens are already thinking about their yearly rental, then it's time all of us got ready. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-80832792836437969822013-02-26T23:24:00.001-05:002013-02-26T23:28:08.987-05:00Wild Men.Late at night. 11 p.m. A day that never saw 40 degrees, saw hard rain, saw standing water all through the backyard. The airport's saying less than an inch, but that can't be true. Two minutes ago both boys were asleep. Now The Wolf stirs, and The Toad coughs out of what we thought was some kind of recovery from croup, from a disaster of a steroid treatment we quit on after one dose. <br />
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Let me not recommend the truly sick toddler and the two-week-old baby. Let me not recommend steroids for this one boy under any circumstance. Lunacy. Criminal rampage. Last time we said never again. This time, save for pain of death, I think we mean it.<br />
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But we survive. A gutter broke on the writing shed, and we survive. The remedy for croup: steroids. The remedy for the immediately aborted steroid treatment: homemade chicken soup, then fresh cold humid air, then steam bath. Meet the new science, same as the old science. Or: suck it, new science. I'll take your pasteurized milk, but do please keep your performance enhancers clear of my kids' presumably semiswollen airways.<br />
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That 60-degree Sunday got me ready. We're a week and some away, as it turns out. Still: all this frigid water in the yard has to go somewhere. Maybe it'll turn the whole thing green.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-70738702059952829712013-02-25T21:54:00.000-05:002013-02-25T21:56:23.683-05:00Bait & Switch.What do you say about a Sunday that ran well into the sixties, gave us shrubbery-transplant weather, kid(s)-in-the-yard weather, old-dog-in-the-sun weather? You say: gauzed-over Monday, heavy cold rain coming tomorrow, one more day of respite after that, and then temps not pushing past the 40s for four or five days running. In like a lion, people. This in a winter of widespread thundersnow. And The Toad has the croup. Thank god there's whiskey. Thank god for the advent of delivered food. Thank god for a baby that as yet sleeps a little better than he ought to. That baby's now coming up out of a nap and truncating the forecast, so we'll end here: Coffee. Tea. Brown liquors. Warm stews. Avail thyself of these, locals, and in the proper order, of course, in tomorrow's refrigerated ark-building weather—and in the days that follow, should we be so lucky.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-4694747478762698252013-02-22T09:54:00.002-05:002013-02-22T09:54:24.138-05:00Snow Day.Curse you, county administrators, for this nearly snowless snow day, The Toad's preschool canceled, the child taking laps around the house, intent upon maximum collateral damage. A little ice never hurt anybody. Just slow down on the overpasses, bus drivers. Take it easy. It's a day for coffee, for thoughts of stew and dark beer, for a little bill paying, house-in-order sort of stuff. I just had all that in mind with a little less fiasco hurtling through these rooms. Guess I should have thought of that before this procreative experiment. Guess I should have sought out a bolder preschool. Looked for one run by folk wearing caribou pelt, metal hats. Wielders of spears. But no.<br />
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AMR sleeps upstairs. The Timber Wolf sleeps upstairs. Down here: barely-controlled mayhem, and what you'd have to be generous to call accumulating precip. And then the kid circles by and says he wants snuggles, and your grim heart warms a degree or two, and you pour another cup of coffee and start again.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-39746181794358209572013-02-21T10:03:00.000-05:002013-02-21T10:03:14.873-05:00Split Timber.Not much else like splitting wood to clear the mind. Crisp out there, bright, warmth in the sun like there has been all week—but we get someone else's weather tomorrow, or our weather from December, or just what we're owed for late February, what we've earned: mid-thirties and rain. The forecast is improved from the ice fog some of the locals wanted to give us earlier in the week—or maybe a hard cold rain is no kind of improvement at all. Maybe an ice fog is the party favor, the parting gift, and all we're getting is the lousy t-shirt. Regardless: wood split for the incoming guests, clothes washed for the babies, coffee larded away in its tin, pot pie up from the deep freeze and thawing in the bottom of the fridge. We'll be ready.<br />
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If I was to report to you the News of the Toad, it'd be ugly, full of tantrum and kicking, and so I won't. I'll say The Timber Wolf is sleeping. I'll say The Toad's at school. There's sun pouring in the back storm door. There's coffee. I'm a little out of breath from the maul, the firewood. Good enough.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-87069610622408142692013-02-20T09:20:00.001-05:002013-02-20T09:20:32.524-05:00Timber Wolf.Kind of a short-sleeves cold out there this morning on the Toadwalk—or maybe that's my wishful thinking. The forecast says we're laid in for another several days of true winter, and, hell, it's not even March, so let's maybe not get ahead of ourselves. Particularly here, at the southeastern HQ of bitching about How Things Once Were, how Winter Used to be Winter, etc. And yes, for those of you scoring at home, even if you're rebooting after give or take a six-month absence, those HQs you've accumulated over the years still attach themselves to the enterprise. So: I'm happy the daffodils are up. I also understand that I'm not allowed to be, that we always get some kind of event in March, or that, at least, We Used To.<br />
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Bright high sky. Crows on the power line on the downhill side. Finches at the feeders. The new Japanese maple's out there standing in its bucket, waiting for half an hour of free time that'll never, in these post-Timber Wolf days, come easily. The Toad and The Timber Wolf. TW has ear fur. The Toad napped yesterday, first time in a week, and came out of the other end of it seeming very like a human boy.<br />
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Jazz on the hi-fi when I came back in the door, but I was so in my head I'd forgotten I had it on, was sure Ben Webster's sax was the baby crying.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-90226080870926406482013-02-19T09:14:00.001-05:002013-02-19T09:14:19.538-05:00No Promises.Late February. The Toad's killing us, pitching fits, kicking, hitting, screaming. When he's out of control, he's gone. When he's not, there are flashes of his same sweet self. There's a new kid on the block. Nico. The Timber Wolf. One week old. He barks in his sleep, knew his name before he got here. This morning, walking back from The Toad's school in all this rain, there were hundreds of cardinals and robins. AMR's asleep upstairs with TW. We're about to slide into spring. Even in the brutal cold of the weekend, there was heat in the sun. I make no promises, but the maples are blooming, and nobody's up, and in the thin light from the overhead in the kitchen, I felt like I ought to tell all this to someone.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-32582812319125419772012-11-12T20:26:00.002-05:002012-11-12T20:26:40.479-05:00Those Words.November. Low clouds. The warm side of the front. The last warm days until the next last warm days. The lettuce keeps pushing, keeps pushing, and we haven't bought salad from the store in six weeks. I'm utterly converted. I may even be converted from tomatoes: though I love them, do they yield like this? Can you eat off tomatoes, in my few square feet, every night? You cannot. Except: AMR, who I love, loves them, and in the grand math of the front yard garden, domestic peace prevails. Perhaps some kind of grand compromise can be achieved. We'll bring together both sides of the aisle.<br />
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A meeting, both sacred and profane, with the profane and sacred new book folk today: How lovely this time around. A different experience altogether. Yes, I'm still licking my wounds from last time, but yes, too, it's nice to feel that for one moment a group of people (a whole group!) might come together around the written word—these written words, at that. Or those, more accurately. Those words. Those are the book. These ones are about the low November sky. Only you and I, dear reader(s), come together around such a thing as that.<br />
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Cold tomorrow. We edge back up against the freeze in the coming weeks. I have low-key greenhouse-style plans—not to winter us through, but at least to protect that which can be protected from frost. I have a sheet of plastic and a few wooden stakes. We shall see.<br />
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Oaks turning. Leaves in all the streets. Sound of the trains more pronounced in autumn than in high summer. I like that. I do, I do.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-24805561920429848142012-11-04T22:28:00.002-05:002012-11-04T22:29:36.695-05:00Time Change.I'm standing at the sink, working my way back and forth between tonight's dinner and last night's dishes. AMR and the Toad are off and triking their way through the too-early dark. Radio on: news. November news. Election, nor'easter. I squirt the wrong dish soap into the pan, the blue stuff, some major brand instead of the fancyass enviro stuff we normally use, and the smell's wrong—not bad, but wrong, out of place, like a 5 p.m. sunset that first Sunday night of regular time—and I'm at the cabin in Virginia, because that's where we use this soap, and then it's not too many steps to another sink, another time, a later November, Palmolive, green, small bottle, my grandparents' home in Nashville, the big one, the one we all grew up in through all those successive Thanksgiving weekends, and then the condo they fell into later on, never the same, but a fine fake—<br />
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What do you want to do with a November that's plenty cool, but arrives with no freeze? I've never had a garden look so good. Arugula. Four kinds of lettuce. Kale coming. Thanksgiving coming. The holidays. All of them. And then the baby. The new baby. Friends and fans of weather, though I know you no longer read, because for so long I no longer wrote, yes, the Toad will have another. Some other amphibian. Chaos. Disorder. Thanksgiving.<br />
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Just that one quick moment at the sink. The wrong soap, some strange smell, and then all of it, the whole of my twenties, some other life, another place, all of it back, all at once. And then AMR and the Toad back through the front door, and the roasted veggies roasting, and then bath, and then dinner, and then Sunday, this new life, this same old standard time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-12924763871464589192012-11-01T16:03:00.001-04:002012-11-01T16:03:16.906-04:00These Questions:Has the sun just suddenly, all at once, dropped lower in the sky? What are the ethical implications of canceling class so that I'll have time to get home and gird the lettuce against the frost? Do I even remember last year's winter? Am I only ever truly happy in November, when it's all still out in front of us? Should someone speak to the good folks at the fancy grocery about pulling down all those wreaths they already had up in all the checkout lanes yesterday?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-52946886744775692742012-10-28T15:15:00.004-04:002012-10-28T19:04:36.470-04:00Oh Sandy.Calling it a Frankenstorm's no good, except for the obvious opportunity to say <i>It's alive, it's alive</i>. But it smacks of a failure of imagination, or ownership. Of a <i>We didn't make that</i>. And maybe we didn't. Maybe snowriccanes happened all the time before 1975, and I just wasn't here to see the pre-landfall cable wall-to-wall. Still. Something about it seems to edge, at least, against the broken. Surely this isn't the main idea. Surely of the possible solutions, this one's an outlier. This tugs the bell curve one way or the other. More perfect than The Perfect Storm, I read or heard somewhere. Someplace on one of the internets. A brand new way to have our own names fail us.<br />
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All this wind's hurrying our own local fall towards an emptier, grayer November, all the leaves down at once, the yellowed maples pushed and rushed through a week of eighty-degree days followed by this. Piles of leaves in the backyard. The Toad in the piles of leaves. The Toad recollecting his age, two and change, and putting the exclamation point on what had been a quiet weekend with an epic meltdown during a Sunday noon picnic lunch in them selfsame piles of leaves. Now a nap. Mercifully. A nap.<br />
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Cold, cold weather coming. Rain and low sky, wind and frost. It's time. I'm ready. I've been ready since I let the forecast start predicting itself back in July and August. I don't do so hot with the heat. It's not my bag. This, boys and girls, cool cats of all ages, is, aside from the apocalyptic portions, more my speed. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-60776337892859846062012-10-25T22:53:00.002-04:002012-10-25T22:53:58.068-04:00We're Back.It has been so long. Never has it been longer. Two months. And yet, here I am, back—the first rule of weatherblog was always: don't talk about weatherblog. Reason? A thought experiment. If it rains for five years in the forest, and mainly the whole thing was to practice sentences...<br />
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But enough about process. The forecast is never about process. The book people wanted to know if I blogged, and I said I did, but that it was in a kind of qualified way—<br />
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So who's reading now? Two more folks, if that many. The rest of you have likely already quit—what good's a forecast that goes on a two-month hiatus? So let's us then return to what this is: a clip reel. Scores and highlights. The poet James Galvin on this question: I live in the South. I do a job. It rains.<br />
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We last spoke in August, friends and fans of weather. Since then we've cooled—significantly, I'd have said, but for this last week, when we went 80 degrees three days in a row, enough maybe to germinate the late kale, the late mache, and surely enough to push the September arugula past baby and into full blown leaf if not bloom. That was not a sentence. Neither was that.<br />
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The Toad? You want to know of the Toad? He speaks. Sentences. Paragraphs. He has an imaginary friend, Ms. Merrin, of whom he is afraid. She lives, he says, behind the moon. He knows exactly where the moon is. Mornings, he wants to know if it's raining. No, I tell him. We don't get enough rain.<br />
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October: We went to the mountains. The next week I left AMR at home, took the Toad back up. I could quit it all, all of it, for a cabin and a woodstove and a place for the now-deaf dog to run within sightline. She'll come back if you wave your arms enough. Up near Whitetop, VA, if the snowriccane hits like they say it will, it'll shift from the 70s to the low 40s. Here, from the 80s to the 50s. All of this coming to a Monday near you. Sorry we broke the planet, I told my freshman comp class. We fucked it up. We drove big cars. I apologize.<br />
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What else? Ice in the glass. We're out of coffee. The dog's fed. The windows are open. I bought a hoodie because I wish I was still 22. I look like some asshole trying to look 22. The World Series. College football. November looming. An actual hurricane threatening snow. If there was ever a time to come back—<br />
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That'll do for now, I think. I intend to try to be back. The weather stops for no man. Or dog. Or Toad. So the mantra around here: try, one more time, to keep up.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-40110590713870724022012-08-22T14:56:00.001-04:002012-08-22T14:56:23.637-04:00Spider Season.He's quit napping. The trash cans are still at the bottom of the driveway. The dog tripped several times on her walk this morning. I'm jumpy, sleepy. He's banging things around up there. I beg him to be quiet, lie still, get some rest. He needs it. He loses his shit right around dinnertime on the days he doesn't nap. It's been cloudy for two days. All the rain in the world, judging by the runoff patterns in the bare spots in the lawn, over the weekend we were gone. Again I've been gone. We were 100 degrees, and then we were not. It was July, and now it isn't. Now we're trying for that strange spot between here and fall, the spot where a hurricane comes in and blows all the wind the wrong way for a day or two. It's spider season, JLT used to say, back in the days when I lived uphill from here.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-66382606469833612142012-07-20T15:16:00.000-04:002012-07-20T15:16:02.224-04:00Florida, Again.Back from the beach always means being comprehensively astonished by the mere fact of green, even if we did go ten 100-degree days, give or take, without rain, give or take. When I was a kid we'd come back to my mother's parched mailbox geraniums; here it's a crabgrass takeover and curling tomatoes. Still: green on green on green, and all this humidity with no breeze to push it anywhere.<br />
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We were Boise or Las Vegas to start the month. Now we've come back home, as it were. Ninety degrees. Air you feel you might be able to section off and pocket. North Carolina. That familiar hint of childhood Atlanta. I read in <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719">Bill McKibben's Rolling Stone global warming piece</a> that it rained at 109 degrees in Mecca this summer—the hottest-ever recorded downpour. If we're headed there, friends and fans of weather, it'll feel like home, only more so, which will be something nice to consider as the planet chews itself to cinders. Or as we chew it there. Perhaps that's the best way to consider climate change: the winters you remember are gone. The summers you recall are here, but much more brightly lit, the volume turned way up.<br />
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Home again, home again. The grass is tall. The weeds are taller. It's too hot to do anything about either. I owe the now-untitled novel on Thursday. This coming Thursday. Six days. There's good air conditioning out here in the shed. Much needed. It vents, of course, into the outside world. Cut and paste your own metaphors here.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-81004350806702660292012-07-11T23:53:00.000-04:002012-07-11T23:53:01.992-04:00So Much.It rained. A great deal. It is 40 degrees cooler. It is still July. That, for now, friends and fans of weather, is all.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-70085352953960675012012-07-08T22:31:00.000-04:002012-07-08T22:31:12.232-04:00Like Dogs.104 on the front porch today. 104. I don't know if I've ever seen 104 before. They say there's a cold front coming. They say storms. They say highs in the eighties. It's been 100 for ten days. I don't believe the forecast. I don't believe the radar. It keeps raining everywhere but here. Three nights this week we heard thunder. I don't believe we'll ever see winter again. Or autumn. Or anything but this. The ferns died. The squash died. My farmer brother called to tell me what of his had died. There was a rabbit lying down like a dog beneath our backyard butterfly bush tonight. If anyone needs to know how hot it was, that's the answer: the rabbits were lying down like dogs.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-58110848430674894052012-07-06T23:04:00.000-04:002012-07-06T23:04:29.930-04:00Still Worse.Here's how much it rained: not enough to connect the dots on the driveway, as my father likes to say. Enough to give us a rainbow. Enough to push the humidity above—gasp—fifty percent. Was it 100? If not, it was close enough to claim it was. It rained ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Nothing got wet but the grass. Hot as hell. Hot tomorrow. My Virginia brother claims 100 on Saturday and Sunday and 80 on Monday, and wants to know what apocalypse awaits us in between. This, I'll tell him, next time we talk. This is the apocalypse. Don't go looking for another one.<br />
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It's August. It's highest August in early July. What we'll do when August gets here I do not know.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-48812706763701956402012-07-05T14:21:00.001-04:002012-07-05T14:22:32.464-04:00Patriot Dreams.Two o'clock in the afternoon: The new porch thermometer says 100 degrees. It also says 34% humidity, but there are storms in the area, so let's hope we can address not one but both of those numbers shortly. Old porch thermometer: taken out by the blackberry popsicle Toad heat wave photoshoot attempt. Ah, fatherhood in the digital age. Ah, analog thermometers. Or would the correct antonym be mechanical? We could play these games all day, buster, and it'd still be brutally awful on my front porch and everywhere the hell else in the 27401 weatherplex. The garden. The lawn. The ferns. The electric bill. Send help. SOS.<br />
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The grocery store, in tiny salvation news, did again start stocking the tiny beers. Let us shine light on even the smallest and most occasional of triumphs.<br />
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Last night, the Toad stared up into the sky and shouted at the fireworks. Then his attention span lapsed, and he shat himself and ran in circles on the driveway until he fell, skinning both knees. Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-48831111262619933262012-07-01T23:43:00.004-04:002012-07-01T23:43:48.129-04:00Plus Two.102 on the front porch this afternoon right after we got the Toad down for his nap -- and raining. I've never seen anything like it. We got that five-degree cooldown you get with storms, and then still it was 97. And raining. Half of me wanted to go get him up, show him, treat it like it was snow. Come see this. Remember this. The other half of me won out, thank god. Later the A/C would crash for the second time this weekend. Later I'd be bailing the attic drip pan with lasagna tupperware. Later I'd be showered and ginned up and planning exactly what I'd say to the A/C company who serviced our unit on Thursday, and then came back out Saturday to try to figure out what they'd done. This is how it goes on the Piedmont: Try to fix that which is only half-broken in front of the heat wave, break it for sure and certain in so doing.<br />
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Only supposed to be 96 tomorrow. Only. Big storms wanting to roll down out of the mountains again tonight. Each night during all this it's tried to rain. Each night—this afternoon included, if you will—it's largely failed. That Toad nap I wanted to interrupt—it rained for ten minutes.<br />
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The dryer's beeping. The Toad was in there today and seems to have reset it. There is the Toad. There is this damn heat. There is the novel, cooking out there in the shed, due for the last time at the end of July. It's July now. There's no coffee in the house. At least I know what I'm doing first thing in the morning. My god in all this furnace do we fall behind.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-84375580979848010092012-06-29T10:09:00.002-04:002012-06-29T10:11:11.681-04:00One Hundred.It's still alright down in the creek bottom, which makes it sound like I live somewhere I don't—like I live somewhere with rolling hills and a half-acre of beans instead of here, in the city, snugged up to the downtown ballpark and downtown itself—but down there it's always cooler, always a little more snow, or there was, anyway, back when it snowed. Today it'll be a hundred. Probably more. Probably 103, 104, 105. Accomplished so far: early dogwalk down the hill. Seventeen gallons of water on the garden. Very hot already up here on the crown of the neighborhood. We've fifteen degrees yet to add on. Maybe twenty. Days of this coming. Hard to believe.<br />
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One wants popsicles, sprinklers, watermelon, can beer, a pool, to be ten years old, to be twenty-three again and in grad school and hunkered into the shady side of the street, to be sure of the air conditioning, a haircut, iced tea, iced coffee, a cool bath, a cold shower, ceiling fans, box fans, an open refrigerator door, one's mother's terrifying yogurt/Cool Whip pie, orange Push-Ups, the ice cream man, ice water, the chance of storms, somebody else manning the grill, a lawn chair, a Coke in a bottle, a Sprite in a bottle, some respite, some relief, some hope in sight.<br />
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87 now on my front porch. 10:07 a.m. Make ready. Bring the dogs inside.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-22062309211351016312012-06-24T21:02:00.004-04:002012-06-24T21:02:55.589-04:00Tiny Beer.Hot this morning on the way to breakfast—we take the Toad for pancakes on Sundays—and hot the rest of the day, too, though somehow less so: this morning promised apocalypse, but then by the end of the day, what seemed right was a charcoal grill and the kid in the sprinkler and a tiny beer in a tiny can. This is the summer of the half-size beer; this is the summer of trying, trying to remember that if and when days end like this, not much else is out there that matters all that much.<br />
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It's trying to rain, but not that hard. Storms holding together off to our south, where they'll slide by, and storms falling apart off to our north, where they'd get us if they weren't waning. Cicadas. Green fruit on every tomato plant. One plant trying to die but not there yet. Okra blooms. Squash for dinner. Basil. Marigolds. I sign off like this all the time. I just don't know what else to tell you.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-2516263335621508432012-06-22T14:17:00.001-04:002012-06-22T14:18:45.308-04:00Bumpy Ride?<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_fXyTJEws8U/T-S2Ms5KnjI/AAAAAAAABzI/LknpBw1HGys/s1600/WUNIDS_map.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_fXyTJEws8U/T-S2Ms5KnjI/AAAAAAAABzI/LknpBw1HGys/s320/WUNIDS_map.gif" width="320" /></a>
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Well, a kid can hope. We got a little pop-up last night around 10:30 or 11:00 that dropped half an inch or so, but this could be flash and bang to go with all that. It's been in the mid-nineties. We're owed a little something to watch from the porch, aren't we? Tiny beer? Friday? It's summer, for those of you just tuning in. It is of a sudden and without any doubt summer.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006073998590455144.post-51555048452310247482012-06-20T20:18:00.001-04:002012-06-20T20:18:23.077-04:00Longest Day.Summer solstice. Mid-nineties. Thirsty tomatoes. Yellow death creeping in. A kid in orbit, running into the walls and bouncing off just far enough to get his speed back up again. Squash in the garden. Okra. Basil. The kid in a new school, a different school, a different idea, a new Toad, the walls, the bouncing, etcetera. He's two. It's showing. I love you, I said. I'm sorry we had a hard day. He hit me in the neck and then hugged me, which was what I wanted badly to do to him. It's trying to rain. It'll never make it. Some odd half-storm trying to hold together long enough to come in from the wrong direction altogether. The wrong side of the interstate, the wrong set of exits, all wrong, everything. If it rains, I'll take my drink out there and stand in it. I'll wake the Toad and take him to see. No. No I won't. You do not touch the child. Not even for snow. Except maybe this winter. Maybe when he's two and a half. Maybe that's when you do a thing like that. You learn to parent. You learn it every goddamn day. Every morning you start over again. Like summer. Like these high summer days. Hot from now until September. Mainly it will be hot. Every now and then, when we're very lucky, it'll rain. Just not tonight.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0