July

From: The Book of the Yard: July 10

July

The summer heat has arrived for its three-week stint, to lay its flat, dry hand over us, animal, vegetable, and mineral alike. It has stilled the air and seems at times even to have stolen it, leaving us barely enough to utter the two syllables required to say its name: Ju-ly.

The sun has become an unrelenting stare. Rising early, setting late, it seldom blinks through intervening clouds. The lilac leaves, so welcome in late March and April, turn themselves inside out to get away from it. Clematis wilts on the vine. The heart-shaped leaves of the first morning glories do the same.

But in its honor, the daisies have begun to open. Their old name's a word eclipsed from two: day's eye. On each auric face a miniature garden of florets stares back.

The sunflower is the birthday flower for June 30, but July is the month that the nymph Clytie, their mythical counterpart, most embodies them. She stares and stares, that lovestruck girl who cannot avert her eyes or her life from the fiery one who abandoned her. Ah, love.

July makes it too hot even for touch. The slightest drift of fabric on bare skin can be too much. We want cooling, soothing potions and ices, soft winds air conditioned to stream across our fevered skins. Cold compresses and even colder drinks to calm our temperatures and our overheated nerves.

The grass grows dry as straw. Cottonwood leaves curl and fall. The day-lilies wither into a spiral unrecognizable as a flower. The parch of mid-day heat's almost unbearable. And this is not even the full desert, but only its edge. It is almost too hot to complain. Though not quite. Even the stars at midnight crackle as we pass beneath them.