Today brought us yet more oppressive heat and dangerous smoke, with no relief in sight. Oh, we had a buildup of clouds once again, albeit nowhere near yesterday’s levels, but also unlike yesterday, these did not deliver so much as a single drop. Every day it’s the same pattern: breathless predictions for monsoonal storms; a […]
Dawn broke this day amid a hazy pall of dirty red-gray smoke. We feared another day like yesterday, trapped in its suffocating miasma of ash and particulate matter, but today, the winds were with us, shifting direction and blowing most of it out past the peaks by midday. Now, what were earlier a gathering collection […]
Today has been all smoke, all the time. It was bad enough yesterday, but overnight the pall settled in over the valley like a heavy, suffocating blanket. I had to get up in the early dark, hours before dawn, to close the windows and the door, because having them open was infusing the house not […]
Our world is dry as dust and choked with smoke. I awakened at five o’clock this morning, not from the sound of barking dogs or the intrusion of the nascent light, but from the suffocating effects of the pall of the smoke that had moved into the area the blanket the whole valley. The haze […]
The temperature is ever so slightly cooler today, only ninety at noon instead of three or four degrees higher. The pall of smoke remains, with no wind to speak of to sweep it out of the valley. The clouds, too, are rather anemic by comparison, far fewer thunderheads gathering than in recent days, far more […]
It’s been another suffocatingly smoky day, the heat ameliorated only slightly, mostly courtesy of the clouds and winds that both whipped themselves into a frenzy around midday. And once again, the storms skipped and skated all the way around us, delivering line after line of dust storms, and not a drop of rain. Now, at […]
Some days are just difficult. This was one, and not just because of the heat, although it certainly didn’t help in the slightest. Neither did the smoke that was socked in with us from dawn until dark, courtesy of a new wildfire start just a few miles away on the slope of San Antonio Peak. […]
Today has been our hottest yet, at least officially: For the first time, weather service reports acknowledged that the mercury even here hit the one-hundred-degree mark — and, indeed, surpassed it, for a high of 102. At that moment, our own thermometer, hung in the shade, registered 96, so I have no doubt whatsoever that […]
Today has been hot sun and haze, the periodic clouds drifting around the mountains in a circle, delivering nothing save occasional high winds to us here. The haze, of course, was largely nothing to do with the clouds; rather, it was smoke, having blown into our small valley here at Red Willow in the early […]
The mercury hovered near the century mark again today, and the weather forecasters stripped our official predictions of any chance of rain. For once, it seemed that they were right; the skies were mostly a hard hot blue with only random puffs of cloud, seemingly too thin and too distant to be of any use […]
With August’s arrival has come more excessive heat, not nearly enough clouds to amount to anything. We did get a few brief showers yesterday, but today, with temperatures back into the nineties again, the clouds are small and scattered, too distant, too sparse and thin, to hold anything of benefit to us. And with the […]
In a world where norms no longer exist, the one constant seems to be that the forecast is always, always wrong. This morning, it assured us that “today’s high temperature will be noticeably cooler than yesterday’s.” We looked at each other and laughed, not out of any sense of amusement, but sardonically, because we knew […]
Today seems to be our hottest yet, reportedly ninety-eight degrees and the mercury still rising. There are plenty of hours left yet for for it pass the century mark. There are also plenty of hours yet for the distant thunderheads to converge upon us. The winds have risen over the last few minutes, which seems […]
It feels as though this heat will never break. After such hope last week, courtesy of an extended forecast that promised real and significant rain for every single day, to have not only no rain but the mercury climbing ever higher by the day is as enervating as it is oppressive. It’s hard to force […]
This is a frankly murderously difficult week. Every day is hotter than the one before. Worse, the week-long forecast for rain is not merely failing to materialize, but being actively erased from predictions . . . and from any remotely possible empirical chance, as well. This morning’s sky was a hard hot blue, only a […]
Some days are just brutal. Today, the official temperature was already at ninety-eight degrees by noon, and that was with plenty of thunderheads already formed and casting shadows. That alone tells me that we passed the century mark today, although in keeping with its current denialist practices, the weather service pretends that it did not […]
Today has delivered a stark reminder of just how purely elemental a season summer here can be . . . and what the implications of that fact truly are. There is a fire in the low forest land just a mile or two east of us as the crow flies. Its smoke plume first showed […]
Early afternoon, and our thermometer reads about eighty-eight. That’s in the shade. Out in the sun, the current officially-reported temperature of ninety-six — already two degrees above the projected high — is very clearly in effect. The weather folks have also done away with any real chance of rain for today. In truth, that means […]
Early afternoon still, and it’s raining. Not a lot; just a light shower. But it’s rain, and it looks as though there could be the promise of mroe behind it. And given that the mercury has already officially hit ninety-seven today, even here, anything that cools air and earth is badly needed now. Of course, […]
The mercury had hit the nineties by ten-thirty this morning — the thunderheads still distant and entirely white, no wind, the air suffocatingly oppressive and miserably hot. By that point, we were already leaving for a day of long-overdue errands, and it seemed that everywhere we went was simply more of the same. The only […]
No matter how fierce the gathering storm, it seems that we are destined to receive none of its benefits. Virtually none, anyway. We had a couple of periods of sprinkles today, nothing more than scattered drops, and one spell that might charitably be called a light shower. Rain — real rain, of the sort this […]
Today was a typically summery clash of opposites here: brilliant sun riding high in a bright blue sky, with high heat to match; abundant clouds, sufficient to drop the mercury nearly thirty degrees; plenty of thunder and periodic winds, but only brief rain showers, barely enough to tamp down the dust. Those diametrically opposing forces […]
The heat is brutal. The sun’s glare is merciless, the trickster winds unrelenting. This is not summer here at Red Willow; this is something else entirely. It’s not that we don’t get high heat in this season; it never been unknown for us to hit, or even pass the century mark. The difference now is […]
Some days are just hard. When it’s a Monday, too? Well, to the outside world, that’s significant, but to us, frankly, it doesn’t hold a lot of meaning, since our work is something required of us seven days a week. More to the point, the heat has returned with a vengeance. It was already ninety-three […]
