Barely into summer, yet ready for July 4th

from Google Images

 

 Geez! 97.3 degrees at 4:30 p.m. on the 3^rd day of summer! And the same prediction for the following day. Wouldn’t you think we would gradually, gradually move up to that temp? Oh, wait. Temps have  climbed since late spring. These playful seasons—they delight in teasing, joshing with us. Mother Nature is behind all of this, I’ll bet.

What? Global warming, you say? Sigh. It certainly seems so. Or perhaps I have a short memory for temps during the past summers.

 

Except one: 1980. It was excruciatingly hot. Especially in a small, frame, rent house on a hill in Bryant. Central heat and air? You gotta be kidding. No wonder I looked for a house to buy. (Don’t ask.)

 

On the day last week I typed this, the temp climbed higher—to 97.7 with a “feels-like” temp of  111. And on the 3^rd day of summer! My three window ACs in the front of the house labored. The one in the living room put out enough water for a nice-sized herd of cattle. Thankfully, though, only two cats drank from it. The flower beds and porch plants got the rest. Oh, and the five chickens I’m babysitting, uh, hen-sitting.

 

Speaking of summer’s heat, a friend/ colleague who lives close to Tucson said it was 100 degrees after 9 p.m. out there. And, that June was the hottest summer month. I’d never heard that. Had you? I figured it got hotter as the summer progressed. Hmm. What is that “lucky old sun” doing up there? “With nothing to do, but josh with those peasants down there.” (Apologies to Haven Gillespie for the parody.)

 

One more item, then I’m through harping about summer. From a poem, “Dozing on the Porch with an Oriental Lap-rug,” by Richard Tillingast, 1969, are these three lines:

 

 “…it is four in the afternoon

 a cold June so far

 cold enough for a fire . . .”

 

(from an anthology, The Wesleyan Tradition of American Poetry: Four Decades,” p 100.)

 

July 4: the day on which former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and James Monroe died. Stephen Foster, popular song writer, was born the day Adams and Jefferson died, and George M. Cohan claimed July 4, 1878, as his birth date, which was actually July 3. (from The Trivia Encyclopedia by Fred L. Worth, p. 134.)

 

“O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties/ Above the fruited plain! / America! America! / God shed His grace on thee, / And crown thy good with brotherhood/ From sea to shining sea!” – written in 1893 by Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929: Educator and poet).

 

May your July 4^th celebrations be full of deep appreciation of what blessings and possibilities we have available in America.