This is just to say

Well the weatherdude got that one so wrong, more wrong than the one time I wore drag (for Halloween - I make a scary, scary woman), more wrong than the poor schmuck I savaged in my last post. When checking the forcast with the local gets-it-wrong-all-the-time news team last night, weatherdude estimated the high today at a very civilized eighty-six degrees. He could have been half-assing it what with the beastly heat and mid-summer doldrums, I assume he just reached into his magic statistic machine and let it run some random numbers instead of doing some real weather prognostication. All I know is that the last time I looked the thermometer registered ninety-nine and I dared not look again for fear that the mercury would keep going until it did one of those cartoon pop the top off the glass moves then turns to steam and makes a little mushroom cloud.

Too hot to cook (much less move with any intention) and yet the wee ones were howling for food, little necks craned back and mouths agape like baby birds - I was tempted to regurgitate my lunch for them but I suppose that would have warranted a visit from DHS. Instead, I slapped together some turkey sandwiches, slices of watermelon, and a big communal bowl of cherries.

Perfection. There's nothing like cold, succulent cherries on a hot day. Pits covered the kitchen floor along with watermelon seeds and crusts of bread (it's always the crusts), fronts of t-shirts pink from the juice that dripped from eager chins. As dad cleaned the table - and the floor - the brood made their way out front to make the most of the rest of the summer sun, dirt patched on the remnants of the evening's cherries. The evenings are still long but shorten with each passing day and eventually I will not be able to complain about the heat, the kids will not be chasing the last light out or carrying their cherry mud into the tub.

Sans cherries, the sentiments are the same, a moment frozen in time; I have mine, William Carlos Williams had his:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.