I’ve nothing to say.

 

I’ve nothing to say.

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Truly. I’ve nothing to say. My mind is fried, blackened to a carbon crisp beneath the unrelenting heat dome. The way it is today is the way it will be forever and ever, amen. I know that is a big, fat lie, but it is the way I feel. Discouraged.

Every morning I scurry to get basic cleaning done before 9:00 because three-digit heat comes with companionable dust. I knock back the most visible dirt and mop the floors because that layer of dust is slick and slick is dangerous to old feet. There is no sense doing a big clean because at the day’s end, dust is back thick and thicker, thanks to a huge construction project up wind.

I hope you never experience a heat dome, like being under a lid on a boiling pot, but even with a normal high summer, please be careful of yourself and with those around you, making sure your family, friends and neighbors stay hydrated, stay safe.

As careful as I am, I’ve had several bouts of sickness from the heat. I suspect that once you’ve been fried, you are more vulnerable. The worst part of it for me is feeling completely drained of energy, to a point my mind quits working, similar to a minor depression. I take another shower. I may be sweaty but I am clean sweaty. 

 In support of another hot topic, “Women of the world, unite!” We will have a new presidenta in Mexico. She gives us hope. When I first typed the word “unite”, I typed “untie”. Perhaps it was not a mistake, but a happy accident. We live in hope that women of the world get a chance to untie many of the knots of the past. That, my Dear, is as political as I am willing to get. In public.

I’m more than willing to be silly. Four of us women are visualizing lifting the heat dome. We are. Visualizing. Up, up and away.

My house has become a haven for lizards. Why? Lizards thrive in hot sun. Don’t they? It is only marginally cooler in my house than outside on the rocks. The creatures must crawl in beneath the gap at the bottom of the screen door. I did not invite them. I do not encourage them. I made attempts to catch and release. Don’t laugh. Lizards 3, me 0. I give up.

Why do lizards want to be inside? I can’t imagine. Maybe in search of water? Lizards eat bugs. Maybe if they stay, they will rid my house of spiders, ants, flies and mosquitoes, the occasional earwig or roly-poly bug. I hope I have enough house bugs to keep the lizards fed. Don’t ask me where that thought originated.

You may think my house a bug haven. It is not. Which is why I worry about the lizards. I hate to think of a lizard gasping its last in starvation agony behind my book case. On the other hand, they found a way in. There are an equal number of ways out.

Every day I check the long range weather forecast. Every day I see the same page. I suspect the weather people are on vacation in Antarctica and have set their computers to “rerun”.

I look for disturbances out in the oceans, anything which might mean change is coming our way, some day, soon. Nary a cloud in any sky. The NOAA people have put hurricanes on hold, not that I want a hurricane, but, guilty confession, hurricanes do bring cooling rains.

Trying anything to keep up my spirits, I focus on the birds. The Bird of the Day, my call, is the “Let-it-go” Bird. This is a year-round bird, here every day. Its song is just that, “Let-it-go, Let-it-go, Let-it-go”. Good advice any day.

“I’m trying to let it go, bird, I’m trying.”

There goes that pesky fly again. Where is my lizard when I need one?

I’m sorry. I really have nothing to say.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

June has arrived

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