Down by the riverside

The thermometer reached well over 90 degrees yesterday on

Portabago Bay, with enough humidity to make whatever the formula for heat index is yield a pretty uncomfortable looking number. We did a little work to pick up after the previous night’s city council victory celebration party but mainly we just worked on cleaning up the left over assortment of very cold bottled beer, listened to the birds and talked about stuff that older guys talk about when they are too worn out from the previous days or nights exertions to do anything but talk.

Ideally there would have been a baseball game on TV but the satellite wasn’t cooperating so that particular piece of summer background buzz was missing. The river was wide and very still, a seemingly immobile expanse of mocha colored water. Silt, imported by last weeks rain will eventually wash on down stream, settling out of the water as the river widens and slows. A peaceful and even a bit mysterious deep olive green will return as it always has for generation after generation of river life.

The Japanese beetle inside the screened gazebo kept climbing the screen, looking for a way out, which it never did find. Smaller summer bugs and spiders and such clung to the outside of the screen, silhouetted against the hazy summer sky, a bug world mirror of kids hangin’ out on a street corner maybe.

If there had been a dog there with us, he would have been laying, stretched out on his side, asleep under the downdraft of the ceiling fan on the shaded and cool brick of the floor, an occasional single thump of its tail signaling whatever dream he was having.

It felt slow. It was wonderfully slow, just the ticket for a southern summer Sunday.

Comments

[rhonda]

Hi Jim, thanks for stopping by my blog.

Both your writing and your photography are beautiful.