The air is dense and pungent, laden with expectation of rain yet strangely minus any low lying dark clouds. The cloying spice of cloves from the petunia bed mingles with the bracing freshness of someone's aftershave and the gagging putridness of rotting garbage from the dumpster nearby. Sugar sneezes and wipes her face in the bristly brown grass.
I hurry her along, concerned about being caught in the impending promised deluge. It seems as if the air is so saturated with moisture that the excess will wring out at any moment. Even the birds chatter unhappily, struggling to accomplish their morning ablutions before the flood begins. For once the weather people are on target, predicting scattered showers today along with 99 degree heat.
I remember summer mornings like this at Gram's. She would stand by the kitchen window, wiping her neck with her apron and clucking her tongue. "Gonna be a scorcher." The chickens in the coop raised dust clouds and protested barometric pressures that set them on edge. And we waited. All of us. The whole world, faces to the sky, waiting. Waiting for those first precious drops, the harbingers of relief. The magic of storms that would wash color back into dehydrated scenery.
And when it finally came, Gram and I would rush out onto the back lawn and twirl around with arms outstretched, licking the splatters from our faces and laughing and whooping until we sank down exhausted on the porch steps under the little lean roof and watched life come back into the world.
I pat Sugar, hoping today will be one of those days, wishing I could reassure her that this will pass.
I hurry her along, concerned about being caught in the impending promised deluge. It seems as if the air is so saturated with moisture that the excess will wring out at any moment. Even the birds chatter unhappily, struggling to accomplish their morning ablutions before the flood begins. For once the weather people are on target, predicting scattered showers today along with 99 degree heat.
I remember summer mornings like this at Gram's. She would stand by the kitchen window, wiping her neck with her apron and clucking her tongue. "Gonna be a scorcher." The chickens in the coop raised dust clouds and protested barometric pressures that set them on edge. And we waited. All of us. The whole world, faces to the sky, waiting. Waiting for those first precious drops, the harbingers of relief. The magic of storms that would wash color back into dehydrated scenery.
And when it finally came, Gram and I would rush out onto the back lawn and twirl around with arms outstretched, licking the splatters from our faces and laughing and whooping until we sank down exhausted on the porch steps under the little lean roof and watched life come back into the world.
I pat Sugar, hoping today will be one of those days, wishing I could reassure her that this will pass.
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