mid-summer blessings

It’s 30 C. (86 F.) on the farm this midday. Even with the typically low humidity, this is a scorcher for us. I know that my peeps in Kansas would call wimp on me, but it is what it is. Ace buddy Bill called me recently from the Kansas City area during one of its guaranteed simmering summer days and asked me what the temperature was here. “You don’t want to know,” I said, and in his wisdom, he didn’t pursue it. The running joke in America’s heartland is that in the summer, you can carve your initials in the air.

Real life Avenger Pete Hegseth is on Capitol Hill trying to explain the upsurge in casualties in the Iran not-a-war. Trump is threatening to hit Pickaxe Mountain, a buttressed facility that may be part of Iran’s nuclear system, “probably pretty soon”. This metastasizing clusterfuck is starting to take on a Vietnam vibe. And there’s plenty of water there for an updated Gulf of Tonkin incident.

So what’s a worried world villager to do? Count her or his blessings, that’s what. Until Jude and I come back in this evening for chow and our evening mix of news, Jeopardy and reruns of M*A*S*H, I will be outside in the shade of our maple trees, breaking up dried out Japanese knotweed stalks. The plant is considered one of the world’s most invasive species, nearly impossible to get rid of. It’s all over the farm, but we learned early on to co-exist with it, merely mowing over the patches we didn’t want.

The bees love its flowers, spring shoots of it taste like rhubarb and the dried stalks make excellent kindling. So I adjust my attitude with beer and/or THC, then loll away the day to the audio cassettes I recorded decades ago. My favourite is a mix of Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and the nonpareil “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”. That song, inspired by the first line of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, has been covered countless times, and I’ve yet to hear a shitty version.

So there I sit, as content as any concerned citizen could be, letting the music pass through me and the 21st century pass by me. Yesterday one of the ravens, either Lee or Annabelle, stopped by to collect the mouse I’d thrown onto the shed roof. He or she offered a hearty “donk”, which I took to mean “thank you”. They have an incredible vocabulary and I’d love to cultivate a heartier connection, but they are too wary of the dogs, although they love to antagonize them.