Sanctuary

It hadn’t rained all month and everything was dead and ravens squawked. Letting the “yard” go back to Nature wasn’t going to make another house show up, but I’d given it a good shot—now we had a fire hazard, and I couldn’t find the hose. At the same time, the weather was a little out of bounds for seven thousand feet: low nineties (33°C), single-digit humidity, gusty winds out of the west. It went on like this for quite a while. What with the temperature inside the old adobe never getting out of the sixties, even with the doors and windows open, I knew where to be, and the cutting and the raking took about ten days. My wife was gone the whole time visiting in Minneapolis. I’d do a little work and take a nap and every other cycle have a snack, but mostly sit here in the coolness by the screen door, listening to the birds and checking news on Twitter, wondering if we had a chance.