If you can't stand the heat...don't move here

Yeah, so it's been in the 100s for days, including one fine reading of 113.9 degrees on our front porch. Fortunately the humidity is around 10 percent or less, or we'd be boiling in our own sweat. That's the difference between heat here and in the Midwest and South. I prefer here, although my favorite temperatures are still the 60s-80s, even year round as we had them in the Bay area.

And we turn the wheel each day to create business, to move things ahead a little so that eventually money will come out.

The garden grows green and lush amid the unirrigated parched and crispy beige of the landscape, and we're reaping green beans, chard, and cucumbers, with tomatoes reddening and nearly ready to pluck from heavy vines. I do like gardening, seeing what I've planted come to fruit, and I like fixing meals with veggies I've grown (although what I'm going to do with all these cukes is beyond me!), flavored with herbs cut fresh from that end of the garden. It's organic, too -- marigolds and the cats mostly keep the bugs and critters down, and the fence is not inviting to the deer and rabbits that we see daily.

The deer get their share, though -- the huge cukes hidden under the leaves get cut up and tossed; the bolted lettuce and spinach and spent pea vines were theirs too. This year's zucchini crop will be small: some of last year's is still in the freezer or dried, and Tony is just *not* into more of it this year! In another month I'll plant lettuce and spinach for a fall crop, and think about broccoli, a crop I've not yet tried.

Watching the crops grow and ripen really marks the passage of time for me, much as preparing for each new school year did when my daughter was little. Another cycle passed; another harvest ready; I know winter will come and the heat will instead be focused around our wood stove and the cool will be outside (and free!) instead of inside and expensive.

Gratitude for heat and cooling and these cycles of living are part of my daily mantras, as much as brushing my teeth and showering are. I've found I CAN stand the heat, whatever it brings, because it will eventually change.