"Two wrongs may not make a right but a thousand wrongs make a writer.”

Monday, August 11, 2025

I'm Not Pining - The Drought Diary

What's been going on Folks? I'll tell you a story.

I used to have a haynow diary back when I had papa's haymow for a writing hideaway. Now I have a boring armchair dairy. But today I'm calling it a drought diary. Looking for a rain cloud, avoiding the sunny side of the street. 

I've been digging the weeds out from around my tomato plants. They had a slow start with all the deer hobnobbing about, then the tiller broke, then it rained, then I was down and out with a nasty cold, so the weeds ran away like the dish and the spoon. Now drought. Sitting under a ceiling fan, scornfully disdainful of AC. But....

If our norm continues to be 90-plus-degree-days, I shall succumb. Are there still people out there who think global warming is a hoax?  Not if they're as old as I am and can remember when it snowed by Thanksgiving and winter didn't let up until April. The one small exception was the famous January thaw. Do you know what that was?  It was famous about the barns. If you're under forty you may not know. If you are under thirty you probably don't care.

My poem for a summer day

I'm Not Pining

The drone of the crop duster drifts through my window

like a helicopter looking for a landing.

 

Birds sing and flit around the feeders

But where are the butterflies?

 

What is a will-o'-the-wisp?

What is a whip-poor-will?

 

The bees that escaped their hives in protest

Of a neighbor’s rough handling swarmed

 

My porch, my yard, my window screens.

After two days, they rediscovered their hives


And released from their siege, I went to the grocery. 

The anniversary of a death approaches


But I’m not a Buddhist to celebrate the end. 

I’m not pining like the doves who coo


From the highwire from where they see what they see 

But where are the butterflies? Where are the pond frogs?

 

The crop duster returns in the evening to herald dusk

the way frogs once did in the lowlands where the will-o'-the-wisp lived.

 

A murder of crows caw distress from the top of a tree

Struck by lightning. Will they remember my face?

 

 

 

 

 

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