Finally, the heat seems to have broken. But of course we got no rain yesterday, just the rumble of someone else's thunder. The drought goes on and on. It has been weeks since we've had a real downpour, let alone a slow soaker.

Still, I'm managing to keep the vegetable garden alive. Beans and cucumbers and peppers are thriving. The last of the blueberries are ripening. Tomatoes and eggplant are fattening. I'm overrun with basil and cilantro. The late-season crops--kale, leeks, carrots--are maturing. And the high-summer flowers are in their glory: dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, calendula, coneflowers, bachelor's buttons. They are a distraction from the dead brown grass.

Yesterday I finished up an editing project. I cleaned floors; I stacked some firewood; I read a few pages of Eliot's Four Quartets and several stories in Best American Short Stories 2010.  I blackened salmon, and boiled potatoes, and made a huge salad of green beans and caramelized peppers. T came home with bags of concrete and spent his evening securing the footer of the new woodshed. Tonight he might start framing.

For my part, I'm starting a new editing job and working on some class planning and messing around with poem drafts and maybe submitting a few things. It's possible that the air will be un-humid enough for me to ride my bike this morning. Of course I'll have to water, and hang laundry.

                                   Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner.

                         --from T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," in The Four Quartets