1.
Perhaps it wasn’t the best time of day to be digging in the dirt. But there were other things to do earlier in the day, and so I showed up at 2:30 with the 100+ degree sun beating down on the little patch of ground where some digging needed doing. It was indeed a little patch of ground, just a few feet of packed soil with weeds and Bermuda grass that needed clearing.
The ground and the weeds and the grass held tightly to each other. Separating them required some effort. Yesterday things started with the mattock and gradually moved to a garden fork. But today it was a long handled shovel, frankly the tool I should have been using all along. (What was I thinking?)
Inch by inch, the shovel sliced thru the dirt as the sun beat down and sweat ran down my face, dripped off my nose, drenched my shorts and soaked my shirt. But on the other side of the driveway was a patch of shade and a mercifully cool breeze and a chair in which to sit. I visited the chair often.
“It’s a good thing you don’t do this for a living,” my aunt once told me. “You’d go broke.”
It’s true. I would. But I don’t.
2.
The dogs dashed out the door into the pouring rain. There was no thunder to rouse them. The rain was anomaly enough.
“We need fifteen minutes of this,” said the fair and industrious Trudy as she looked down at her phone to mark the time.
After a while, the downpour eased.
“Five minutes,” Trudy called out, “not enough time.”
Nothing but a light drizzle remained, and the sun was threatening to come out. But then it started raining again harder than before. Another five minutes. Maybe ten.
“I bet you haven’t seen a day-long rain in a while,” Ken said to me the other day.
“No,” I said. “Haven’t seen one of those since I moved here in ’82.”
He laughed, but it’s true.
Fifteen minutes of rain. We’ll take it.
3.
At the end of day, the cloudy skies cleared and the sun went down. The sky lit up in hues of pastel blue and pink.
Dusk advanced from the east, passing overhead, chasing the pink away, turning the clouds into wisps of purple/grey.
Four swallows raced in great circles beyond the silhouettes of the Live Oak trees. Somewhere down the block, Nighthawks were beginning to sing.
Standing beside the street where the brutal sun of summer beats down on it every day, the Texas Redbud stood in the gathering gloom with its deep green leaves curled up in places, holding glistening drops of water from the rain.
And just before night descended, a spider spun a web between the Redbud branches, a gentle breeze buffeting it back and forth.