I was cruising around the backyard yesterday after work, mowing with the Deere and thinking about how unlike a normal early June evening it felt. The temperature was hovering around the 90 degree mark and the heat index was even higher, so naturally my mind wandered up on the mountains…Daydream style as I went round and round.
I see that Ray is calling for a warm summer day in Valle Crucis. The seventies seem a little warm for this early, but I really don’t have a lot of mountain weather experience to go on. Seems nice and cool to me for the heat of the day…I keep telling my wife that no matter what happens with global warming/climate change, it’s gotta be more comfortable up on the Blue Ridge. Besides, when it’s too hot to do anything but sit in a rocker on the porch, at least you have a view of something outside the yard around the house…
I can remember summers on the porch at my grandparent’s ranch house in south Texas…Way down toward the Rio Grande, sitting high and dry between the Frio and the Nueces River in McMullen County. It was hot and dry but with a breeze most of the day off the Gulf of Mexico over a hundred miles away. Staring off into the distance…Watching the clouds winging north. The buzzards coasting along looking for dinner. An occasional roadrunner sitting in the mesquite across the drive with a collared lizard hanging from it’s beak…Watching and waiting for the afternoon heat to break while my grandfather enjoyed his daily siesta. It wasn’t a habit a teenage boy could acquire, napping after lunch.
That’s the way the weather here is feeling these days…Hot and dry…The grass I was mowing was almost like straw already this year. We don’t normally see weather like this for a couple of more months. All of the rains in the last few months have passed by to the north. Even the rains that get close falter before they fall on this dry ground we call home…Dry, dusty dry.
Today is the second anniversary of my Photoblog. Two years ago today I started posting photos with a shot I am still proud of taken at the Brinegar Cabin on the blue Ridge Parkway…I’ll bet the water from the spring is still cool at this time of the year…