You're not my friend anymore!
You’re not my friend anymore. Did I shout it out loud? I can’t be sure, but when I listened there was no echo. Silence. There are just two moments in the year when the silence is so, well, silent, you can hear your own pulse pumping away in your ears. The deepest of deep cold in January through February when the light acquires a crystalline fragility, so brittle you find yourself whispering for fear it might splinter. And midsummer when the temperature creeps into the high thirties and even the air seems to sweat. Like today.
The quietness isn’t the stillness of peace, but rather of an uneasy waiting… for shade, for a breeze, for (dare I say it) a cloud. The crickets and cicadas have fallen silent. Birdsong is a distant memory. A buzzard calls once, twice. The rippling call of a golden oriole out of sight in the branches that stand between me and… you’re not my friend anymore!
That time I did say it out loud, a bit sheepishly I admit, but there’s no-one around to hear. No-one else crazy enough to be out there in my crunchy sun-dried meadows, scorched to a crisp by… it, him, my enemy of today. The sun.
I’ve never got on well with those bossy types, overbearing, so sure of themselves. And that exactly describes the sun yesterday, today, tomorrow, who knows for how long. From the moment the first rays escape from behind the mountain, it’s up there glaring, blazing, blinding, greedily sucking up every last drop of moisture from the ground, bleaching flowers, withering leaves without a care in the world.
My meadows… they’re tired. Dusty. Held together with cobwebs in that silence of waiting; patient as befits a nature accustomed to the never-ending cycle of the seasons.
But all is not over. Far from it. For some, the party’s just begun…
My meadows are tired and truth be told, so am I. This heat is good for drowsiness, not so great for sleep. But we wait patiently (more or less) for the next chapter to unfold, that miraculous second spring that will follow the first late summer rain. It won’t be long now, and I’ll be out there, shaking the dust from my boots, to follow its progress.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.