All day I tried to write a blog post about my beautiful summer flowers, but all I can think about is the little girls swept away in the Texas floods. Summer was beautiful for them, too, swimming and canoeing, supported by the river and trusting in the goodness of life as children do. They slept, and the world changed. They woke to thunder, and the lurch of a power they never knew the river had.
Those sweet, small lives. Not only the devastated families whose daughters were lost, but also those girls who survived, now have this experience engraved on their hearts. All the rest of us, no matter our politics or attitudes toward climate disasters, have hearts rent by their pain right now.
Meanwhile in Texas, they will face the question of blame. Blame is useful if, instead of poisoning regret and generating revenge, it is targeted toward solutions to the problems that fed the disaster in the first place. To have a child, the saying goes, is to have your heart walking around outside your body. All those girls, beautiful as summer flowers, leave many empty spaces behind them, and only memories to fill them in. I hope the families of Camp Mystic can find comfort and solace in remembrance.
My friend Cindy is always a little sad when the rudbeckia bloom because in Michigan, she says, it means summer is almost over. But Labor Day is no longer the benchmark it once was, not even for schoolchildren, who are increasingly likely to go back to class in August. No one would say summer is over in August. And this year frost is not predicted for southeast Michigan until November, so I think she has plenty of summer left.
So do the fawns. I’m told they’re mostly born in June, but we don’t see them foraging in our yard until mid-July, and more of them in August. They will lose those spotted markings as they grow their winter coats, usually starting in September. It will be interesting to see when that happens this year.
Bumper Crop
Robin Richstone 