Tuesday night

So I recovered from my illness and back pain, but then immediately following that Silver got pretty sick. It was bad enough to keep him out of work for two days, sleeping a lot and occasionally grimacing and clutching his belly.

And the heat. Oh, man, the heat. I've never spent the summer in Vermont before, but this is insane. Friday was fairly cold -- I woke up and immediately pulled the covers up to my chin -- and when Silver said the weather report was predicting ninety for the weekend I thought it was a mistake. This is not uncommon -- I think the weather station that reports to weather.com for our area is actually located a good forty-five minutes away in Keene, NH, so it's often off by quite a large margin. But this prediction was, unfortunately, quite an accurate one.

On Saturday I walked to the farmer's market and got some pretty fruits and veggies -- honeycrisp apples, red potatoes, red scallions, and rhubarb -- but by Sunday the rhubarb was droopy from the heat, but the plants seemed to thrive on it:
Honeycrisp apples, rhubarb, red potatoes, and red scallions from Dutton; shallots and garlic from California, tomatoes from Vermont and Maine:


Wildflowers I picked along the way back -- I love those tiny blue ones with the spot of yellow in the middle:

Baby pole beans! (Kentucky Wonder, I think).
Spinach seedlings:
Some Kentucky Wonders a bit further along:
Our stalwart tomato plant, keepin' on keepin' on:
The mugginess reminds me a lot of the day of the blackout a few years ago (2004?) in New York -- when I spent the whole day sitting inside being hot and miserable, and then going outside and being hot and miserable. I found myself wanting to shave my head and wondering how soon I would regret it if I did (Silver's response: probably within the hour). We passed the time watching a lot of movies -- bits of the BBC's Planet Earth series, finishing The Apartment and Super Troopers, and all of Princess Mononoke and Benny and Joon.

Between the end of Super Troopers and Benny and Joon Silver took a nap on the floor, and I washed dishes. He wasn't feeling much better during dinner, but then we sat out on the stoop (it was actually cooler outside than inside) to watch Benny and Joon. There was a nice breeze that picked up and kept some of the mosquitoes away from us, and then we started to see lightning out of the corner of our eyes. We paused the movie and walked out into the driveway to look.

Yes, it was lightning. Far away, still, but coming. "Maybe it'll rain soon," I said. "Maybe ever in the next day or two." It was a glimmering hope. Watching the movie again, Silver suddenly noticed that he felt significantly better. And the breeze kept blowing, and we stretched out our arms and watched Sam ape Buster Keaton and the lightning grow closer.

Towards the end -- somtime after "the kissy scene" -- the wind got too loud to hear the movie well, so we moved just inside the hallway. It was literally minutes after the movie ended that we started to hear the rain.

We stood outside in the first thin smatterings of it, and then walked inside. "Thank God for rain," we said. "Thank God for cool air and rain and feeling better." "Benny and Joon," Silver declared, "fixes everything. Why didn't we watch it sooner?" And then the rain started to fall harder, and harder. Right about now the plants are getting a sound drumming and the thunder is just about right on top of us. But I am so happy, so happy, to be cool again. Thank you God for rain. Thank you God for cool air and rain and feeling better.