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| A view from the deck of the barn as the next downpour began. |
If there was a single theme running through the month of July, it may have been sweat. So many thunderstorms and so much excessive heat. And even on the rainless days, and the occasional day of reasonable temps for July, the constant, enveloping, stultifying humidity. Like walking into a sauna. Like breathing through a steaming towel. Every single day, several times each day, sweat would literally run down my face as I walked slowly through the paddocks, drip into my eyes as I leaned to pick up an empty feed pan, and saturate my hair before I returned to the house, threw my wet jeans and shirt into the dryer for a few minutes, and blotted my hair with a towel.
If this sounds like a lot of whining, I'm sorry - I don't feel that way about it. It's just been my reality. And the goats' reality as well. With added mosquitoes. I try to provide a high quality of life for all the animals, and there's no way around it: July has been rough.
I feel so much concern for the people in other places who are desperate for rain. For people from places that are literally on fire. Again. Situations that are totally beyond our control, and which affect our lives in very real ways.
I think people generally become accustomed to the rhythms and range of weather patterns in a place where they have lived for a long time, and do their best to prepare for expected events and even occasional extreme events - hurricanes in my neck of the woods, for example. Maybe there's an unusually dry summer which raises the threat of fire. Or maybe there's a huge storm that causes local flooding and washes out a road or bridge. But now it seems the extremes and "hundred-year" events just keep coming, on and on, one after another, year after year. Have the extremes become the norm?
Well. When I began writing, I had intended to simply post a few of my Daily Markmaking sketches from July, which was World Watercolor Month. But starting out with that first painting of rain through the trees kind of sent me off on a tangent. Yikes.
I'll close with a few watercolors of trees without rain:
