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.

On how my air conditioner gave me a stiff neck

Thursday night our upstairs air conditioner died. When the temperature on the second floor reached 85 degrees, the whole family decamped with our pillows and blankets and took up residence on the sofas downstairs for the night. Three sofas, three people. Seemed like a good idea. Sure beat sleeping in the upstairs sauna.

I now know how a stuffed animal that gets crammed down between the sofa cushions feels. Seriously, all night I felt like I was being folded in half and stuffed in the crack between the cushions. Guess I'm officially too old to sleep on the sofa. I kept waking up during the night with various parts of me so stiff that it hurt to move them.

Amazingly, I didn't get the stiff neck until this morning, 24 hours later. Probably overcompensated last night: slept too hard to make up for sleeping so badly the night before.

The good news is that our NEW air conditioning unit works great. It should, for what we were obliged to pay for it.

Why I Love Oklahoma

I spent yesterday morning up in the Enid/Perry area in northern Oklahoma with a group of middle-school kids involved in the museum's week-long science camp. They were investigating a Permian-age site where hundreds of amphibian tracks have been preserved in a layer of dolomite in the middle of an oil field.

My job was just to be there, experience the program and shoot photos so I can write a story and press releases after the program is over. I shot lots of pictures of the kids, and a few of the wonderful prairie landscape where they were working.

The day was overcast and breezy. A perfect low, ominous Oklahoma sky. The rocking-horse oil pumps all around drummed rhythmically. The long grass all bending together under the wind. People put down Oklahoma for being flat, for failing to have oceans or mountains or the dead drama of the desert. But I love this land. I love the huge sky and the humble, secret life of the fields and scrub oak.

I kept trying to catch a photo of one of the redwing blackbirds at this pond, but of course they were far too wiley for me. I did take a photo of one of the tracks the kids were studying. This is a footprint left in a muddy lake-bottom by some sort of extinct amphibian more th 280 million years ago. You can see where three of its claws dug into the mud as it floated along in the water. Amazing, that something like that would be preserved for so long. The dolomite layer is breaking up now, though, exposed to the weather. The curator told me in another ten years the track bed will be broken up beyond recognition.

The whole area is surrounded by oil pumps and drilling rigs. Looks like most of the property is now owned by Chesapeake oil, one of the two big oil barrons based in Oklahoma City. I had begun to think oil was dead in Oklahoma until I drove out here and saw whole fields full of rocking horses. I hadn't heard them in a long time. They have a wonderful low drumming that can be heard through the earth for miles, especially at night when everything is still. I remember lying in bed at my uncle's farm in St. Louis, Oklahoma, when I was a kid, listening to the drumming of the rocking horses. A comforting sound to me. One I hadn't heard in a long time. I'm such a city girl now, commuting from my house in a manicured neighborhood on a six-lane road to my climate-controled museum every day.

I was glad to get to drive out there, even though I had to leave at 6 in the morning to get there on time. I loved seeing the flat prairie and the fields of corn and cotton and alfalfa. Little bunnies hopped out in front of my car and raced ahead of me for a few yards before bounding back into the grass. A long-tailed rodent scurried out into the road and quickly turned around and scurried back in. Hawks sat on fence posts or sailed overhead. Cows looked at me mildly, chewing. I was full of love for all of it, grateful for my big, under-appreciated, and often ridiculed state. Give me the big sky and the ocean of grass, stinging nettle and wild nightshade that grows those funny green-striped tomatoes that turtles like to eat. Give me the box turtles and the meadlowlarks and the horny toads and blister-beetles. Even those big ol' creepy green and yellow orb spiders that build webs between the stalks of johnson grass or in the barn doorway - their strands so thick and taught you can pluck them like a guitar string. All of that. I love it.

Nowhere else is the sky quite like this.