It’s finally time to get down to the business of summer.
Both the solstice and what this country calls “Independence Day,” with no sense of irony (nor of shame, either), are both in the rear-view mirror. The days have begun to shorten, not entirely imperceptibly, and there is the sense that time grows short as well.
These are the days at the heart of summer.
These are the days of the work.
In an ordinary year, these would also be the days at the heart of the rainy season, but we have not had an ordinary year for some time, and are now forced to grapple with the reality that we may never have one again.
Not so very many years ago, this morning would have been a mix of hot blue bleached by towering white clouds and hot silver light, much like it is now — but with the shades and spirit of the rainbow already well in force on the land, bright green of grass and leaf, all the reds and golds and purples of fruit and wildflower blossom, anticipating the more literal rainbow to follow the afternoon rains.
The rainbows exist mostly in memory now.
Oh, we still see a few of them, mostly distant now. Even in last night’s darkest hours, I was awakened by the scent of rain, but whatever the skies delivered fell upon the peaks, not here. Today promises to be another scorcher, highs nearing or surpassing the century mark, with plenty of trickster winds but no real chance of rain.
This is our new world now: Summer’s heat is also summer’s heart.
So we adjust. We adapt and evolve and continue to the work to keep the land alive and as thriving as it’s possible to be in the face of a still-deepening five-hundred-year drought.
For now, the long-range forecasts insists that we will have rain by Thursday, and then settle, at least for a time, into the more usual monsoonal pattern that marks the heart of summer here. Perhaps they’re right.
If so, we may be granted its shimmering post-storm skies, with rainbows more real and powerful than a fragment cast through a crystal ornament onto a workbench adorned with scattered silver hearts.
For now, though, we’ll take what we can get, whether it’s fragments of color cast by sun and glass or merely the hope that attends a forecast of real rain. Because we are at summer’s heart now, and there is work to be done.
~ Aji
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