August

August is a hot, dead month here. There's a scene in How to See the Elephant where Thetis is remembering walking around the cemetery where her mother is buried and, wanting to do something beyond the usual cemetery-rain-sadness scene, I thought of walking around in August with dried-up grass crunching underfoot and everything in sight scorched and dead, and I wrote that into the scene instead. This August has been a bit of a relief from the usual. When I go out to water in the morning it's coolish, and we've had a number of days when the highs were only in the 90s. (As fate would have it, on those particular days we took a local vacation and complained mightily that the hotel pool was "freezing.") Not much rain, either, no regular moonsoon. My South African succulents are gone. (Why, WHY, do I buy them every year?) The rosebush was doing well until it got rust and I had to cut all the diseased branches off. Now it is growing back, slowly. Well, I'll won't complain and I'll hope for a little more rain before the monsoon is over. In the rest of the country people are making summer last. Here in LV we look forward to fall. (We know it's almost fall when the local news gets pre-empted by football games and Walmart puts 15-cent notebooks in the center aisle. Otherwise, no idea.)