Dog Days

It has arrived. They call it the Dog Days of summer, but I've always thought of it as Oklahoma's Nuclear Summer. When the grass is brown and the trees are whining with cycadas and by mid-day it is so hot and so dry that it feels like its sucking the moisture out of your flesh just walking to the car. At 10 p.m. it's still 87 degrees outside and the air is so still and hot that you feel like you can't get a full breath.

Ahhhh. THIS is summer in Oklahoma. Too hot to go swimming. Too hot to take out the trash or go to the park or even to think about pulling weeds. It's all I can do to muster the courage to go out to water the garden at 8:00 every evening.

My garden is under assault. Some sort of small, juice-sucking insect is leaving white dust all over my cucumber plants, and my tomatoes are hanging on by a thread. Their leaves are drying up and turning brown and I can't find any visible cause of it. I water and mulch. I think I did more harm than good a few weeks ago when I spritzed them with soapy water to get rid of the spider mites. Sheesh. You can't win. I told Gray that if I can't find a way to get rid of this latest parasite, I may have to get all inorganic on them. A little sevin dust goes a long way....

My garden thrives without the added burden of the ducks nibbling everything down. Almost everything has now recovered from their depredations, but I admit I dropped by Atwoods this afternoon to see if they had a fresh crop of ducklings in. They didn't. "Poultry" isn't due until September, the guy told me. Poultry? Are ducks poultry? I guess so. To me, their pets.

Gray said he thought he could construct a coon-proof night shelter for them, and my assistant Krysten told me I could get live traps from the wildlife service and when I caught the offending coon, they would take it and relocate it for me. So I've got a good shot at keeping a second pair of ducks alive.

I miss Ping and Pong.

We had a nice visit this weekend with Gray's cousin Kim and her husband Frank and their three kids. They were driving through on their way home to Houston from Colorado, and we got together for dinner. The two girls are 11 and 13 and very nice in an adolescent sort of way. I remember all the reasons I'm glad I'm not an adolescent girl. It sucks to be a pre-teen, just because you're neither fish nor fowl, child nor adult. They seemed to enjoy their visit, though. They played with the dogs and ran around in the backyard and joined us in conversation.

Grayson made an instant friend in the youngest child, Gregory, who is 8. They bonded instantly over Grayson's books of Pokemon, and spent the evening prowling through his room and running around the house. I love how quickly kids make friends. I wish I could still do that. Why is it so hard to make really good friends as an adult? I have a few good friends, and I'm grateful to them for having the perseverence to stick with me despite what a lousy, lazy friend I am. I can absolutely be counted on to forget birthdays, fail to call for weeks on end, bail out of appointments at the last minute, or hedge and fudge when we're trying to make any kind of plans. I suffer from severe inertia. Gray does too, which just compounds the problem. Fortunately, most of the friends I've managed to keep over the years are either much the same way, or just doggedly determined not to let me fade into oblivion.

Thanks, y'all.