I try. I really try. But I think I’ve reached the limit as far as change is concerned. I think it’s too late for me to learn anything. I’m as locked in place as this rock I saw last weekend with a tree root growing right through it.
Texas Weather
Nope, nope, nope.
There are places on the internet where the word “nope” signifies the writer’s absolute refusal to encounter something, something so horrible, hideous, or terrifying that articulation fails beyond the single syllable. Generally this is reserved for giant spiders, palm-sized cockroaches, and black mambas. Continue reading
A Sunday Walk
Let’s face it: this is not my kind of weather. Just under forty degrees and cloudy, with mizzly little showers off and on. Despite owning an array of cold-weather play clothes, there won’t be any biking for me today. So I skim through The New York Times, check out PostSecret and reddit, breakfast, bind off the sleeve I’ve been knitting for two weeks, play a couple of Facebook games, cast on the front of the sweater, lunch…by noon, death by boredom seems like a genuine possibility. Continue reading
Good-bye, Summer?
I’m finishing up this post at mid-day on a November Sunday. Austin’s Formula One race seethes and screeches excitedly from the television. I’m having a hard time telling a coherent tale of the beginning of autumn. Continue reading
Unruly Weather
It’s Monday morning and I need to get myself to school, but thinking about last Saturday night is more fun. We weren’t at a party or dancing downtown – you don’t go downtown while the Austin City Limits Music Festival is going on unless you savor driving alongside the inebriated and the out-of-town inebriated – we were spending the night sleeping off and on, directly under a storm cell that dumped up to a foot of rain in our area. It’s been a long, long time since we’ve had a wild storm like that, with the near-simultaneous lightning and thunder, and the windows rattling in their casements. Continue reading
October
It’s October.
As usual, it was difficult to believe that summer would ever end. And as usual, it has. First the light changes: you look out your window at a certain time of day and the sunlight is just different. It’s gone from white-hot to yellow, and the clouds have softened around the edges. The sky is darker when you leave work at six or seven. Mornings and evenings are mild again. You can hear dead leaves skittering down the street, and the wind just might be out of the north. Moods brighten. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Continue reading
Yeah But Well the Weather. And Cupcakes.
I’m running way behind in everything everywhere. It’s true that I have become a world-class procrastinator lately, but last week was really not my fault. See, I was interrupted. Continue reading
Summer Food
The realization of a radical truth takes place in many ways, but often it seems like a surprise: You didn’t know something and then, all at once, you know it. This happened to me just the other night. I stepped out, late, to accompany Travis on his last potty of the day, and it was hot. Really hot. Not the romantic, Greek-isle-sexy-breezes kind of night, but hot. Once it’s still 90 degrees and over after 10 p.m., you know without a doubt summer’s arrived. Continue reading
The Sage’s Wisdom. Or Not.
It is a mid-July Sunday in central Texas. The streets are quiet, the two neighborhood pools half filled with families doing family things. This summer’s weather conversation is as follows: It’s hot, says one person.
Yes, comes the reply, but we were lucky this year. It didn’t start till late.
[End of conversation.] Continue reading
The Unruly Gardener Faces Summer
The heat is cranking up. The yard is doing what it’s going to do, but we’ve had some rain and the landscape needs nothing from me.
Well. I did break up the Queen’s Tears bromeliad this afternoon, and that was not easy. She was huge, pot-bound, and a real threat to the tenuous health of my back – for which I had to visit the doctor the other day. Floyd knows if I say, I think I have to go to the doctor, it has to be pretty bad. Continue reading