Weathering the times and mores

I've managed to exceed even my normal levels of grumpy-old-manness this summer. If  I were much more irrational and mean and ornery and short-sighted, they'd make me an honorary Republican. [That's honorary, not honorable. There's only about two honorable Republicans I can think of at the moment.]

Weather forecasts keep promising heat, humidity and thunderstorms, but only deliver the first two. When I was young, sometime in the second half of the last millennium, my mother used to warn me to stop wishing my life away. That's one of a long list of things on which I should have listened to her more intently. Meanwhile, after another scorcher tomorrow, cooler temperatures are supposed to visit, at least for awhile. Depending on how badly we've broken the climate, that may, or may not, begin a longer downward trend from summer's peak to winter's nadir. As a potential means of cheering myself up, I looked it up on the internet. Here's what we can expect if we approximate what used to be normal.

Monthly: 1981-2010 normals - averages, St. Paul

Next month average precipitation increases and average high and low temperatures drop. That's to the good for the next several months. If we follow the historical pattern, it won't be my mother's voice that may be haunting me, it may be those of the nuns who used to regularly inform us grade schoolers that we weren't "sugar plums that will melt in a little bit of rain." To avoid those voices from the past, I'll be getting out and about to limber up for the best three months of the year.

[If you didn't notice, today's title is a play on the Latin phrase "o tempora! o mores!"]

Walking To Oak-Head Pond, And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit In The Next Days And Weeks

by Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled--
I'm wading along

in the sunlight--
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead--
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon--
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from--
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind--

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage--
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,

shudders, and gives way.

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