Summer has dropped like a heavy beam into my front yard. It’s palpable. Hot and dry. The earth is sun baked, cracks appear. The sunflowers that grew like a forest 6 or 8 feet high now bow their heads and mourn. Their roots are shrunken and shriveled in the dirt. The microbes are screaming. I can hear them almost. Everyone is miserable which is why I’m watering the yard this morning before the sun gets up high in the sky, give the guys some respite.
I’m sure any remaining bugs appreciate it too. And the microbes, our invisible neighbors, it gives them a reason to hang on for another day.
It’s the beginning of the end. Everything must die.
The sunflowers have gone to seed and provided food for the sparrows, atleast that’s good. I watch an orange butterfly flitting from seed head to seed head, but the petals are withered or missing and there is no nectar. Most of the summer’s bugs are gone - the little white winged ones, the bees, the caterpillars that ate my spinach, everybody. The giant flying grasshopper is nowhere to be seen.
The birds are gone too, the ones who ate the bugs. Although the cardinal still forages on the ground in the shade outside my screened window. Probably no bugs though.
I wonder sometimes how much damage we have done to our natural environment where creatures still live by the food chain. How many bugs starve and how many birds that eat them starve too.
I saw a lightning bug in the backyard a couple of months ago. When I was a kid they were plentiful. The cicadas too. I heard one playing his violin this Spring. Used to be the air was full of their buzzing.
Anyways, who wants to hear about that. Summer is here and sunshine reigns supreme and who am I to argue with King Summer? I’ll just endure it like I always have - from inside my house with the air conditioning on. I don’t have to stand outside in one place all day.
It’s cyclical isn’t it? Things turn and return. All that once was will be again and all that is shall cease to be. Like the good ole USA. We’re through with our Summer and well into Fall, headed for Winter. But that’s another story.
The fiery little chili pequins are thriving. They seem to like the hot weather. Their berries turn red and dare someone to eat them. I will and the mockingbirds, the ones who planted them there.
Two thorny deep rooted native trees stand in the hedgerow like a couple of old pals - palo verde and retama. They’re not bothered by the hot dry conditions either, they’re desert plants.
And the hackberries too are able to survive. Somehow. They get big and drop their limbs when they get too heavy. I’m not worried about them. The Monterrey oak that I planted 20 years ago when I moved here is healthy too. It’s now the largest tree in the front yard. It features a grotto beneath its spreading branches where you can hang out and watch people passing by in the street with their dogs or kids in tow. They don’t see me.
Some things are thriving, some are dying. Everything is mutable, malleable. Summer is inevitable but it doesn’t last forever. I’ll wait it out. I’ve seen this play before. Day and night. Spring, summer and fall. Winter. The universe itself will end some day. That’ll be some winter. And then it will spring forth again. Maybe. That’s what some people think.
And why not? The ancient people who lived here before us knew about the cycles of nature and were intimate with it. They believed in regeneration and rebirth. If hot dry oppressive summer doesn’t last forever then neither does all our problems. Neither does a lifetime.
My view out the window with the cardinal and the hackberry trees and the dry excoriated tiny patch of land I call my ‘yard’ is bright with sunlight right now but it will soon dim and die out. I’ll watch that too.
Podcast music by Yeahman / ‘Miniyamba’
Main Artists: Hajna, Mina Shankha
Music Publisher: Shika Shika
Composer: Jean Dasso, Mina Shankha, Damien Carissimo
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