Dog and Paddle Days of August

Some things don't know when to start, while in the very same enterprise, other things don't know when to stop.

Here in Piedmont Virginia, it is the dog days of August to a "T." Day after identical day, weatherwise, with the lows in the first light of day in the high 50's, F, and the highs coming a few hours later, in the high 80's, F. Never any rain and not much breeze. Things are slowly drying up and dying, and sometimes the deer eat our impatiens, something they had never done before. And the surrounding woods are much quieter than usual.

Meanwhile, in the part of Florida where my wife is now visiting her relatives, it rains every day, and in another part people like Left Leaning Lady are looking at forecasts of up to 20 inches or more from Fay, which is taking its good time about getting out of Florida and moving its act elsewhere.

We here hope, that it, or more likely a successor, will soon, if some relief can't show up any other way, come up this way and bring lots of water -- even, at least to my thinking, if it's a little too much, though without duplicating Camille. With the lore of that catastrophe thoroughly imprinted on the county consciousness, the "been-here's" should be well-prepared for a reasonable deluge, and we "come-heres" have heard all about Camille, though we have friends who have built homes in the same coves and hollows where that storm swept away over 100 people in this one tiny county, population-wise, in 1969. Fifteen or so years later my son shared a locker in high school with a girl who, like him, had been born around that same time when Camille chose to pull up and stop and hang around a touch too long and in the dead of night, and this girl was named after that storm, while we, still in distant D.C., named our son after a tenor saxophonist who always took care of business.