Rain

The rain we've needed all summer sprinkled some this afternoon, as the first of my two remaining sunflowers burst open with bright yellow petals and began its final prayer to the day. This irony delighted me. There was a definite fall in the air, a chill in the morning and a general cool throughout the day. August has one more week and yet I saw colors in the swamp behind the Lincoln Conservation fields off route 126, and yellowing poison ivy is everywhere. All summer this thick stalked oversized flower has edged itself skyward. Its moment of triumph comes as the region's native dwellers begin a retreat for the season. Everywhere, juxtapositions. I no longer hear the orioles, but the goldfinch were loud yesterday. My cherry tomatoes are just about passed, but the beef-steak tomatoes still have a week or two to go. The sun skipped and jumped between low foreboding clouds all day and found an opening once again at the end. No hint of summer, though, the angles are all wrong. Transition, four weeks until solstice, in the glacier-scraped, hilly town of Maynard.

Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez today on his 700 Club Christian Show. How charitable. More walls are going up in the West Bank. The outpost settlements, those furthest isolated from militarized Israel, have been evacuated completely. The larger ones will remain and are getting a wall. An enormous piece of defensive engineering. Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush keep saying the war is going well, despite the brewing Iraqi civil war and the commitment of more United States troops. The world has indeed gone mad.