Right at half a year ago, I wrote a bit about the darkest day of the year. Today is very much not that; it is, as might be expected, the opposite, being the brightest day of the year. With that different light, some of the things I note in the earlier piece might bear a bit of examination.

I noted then that the seasonal progression matters less here than in many places. It remains true as I write now, with the weather tending toward the hot and dry(ish; there’s often vexatious humidity in the morning, but less often rain, and less with each month until after August). The rich greens and grainy ambers that mark summer in no few places in the country do not feature here so much as in those places; the greens are fading to browns, and even the blue sky hazes over with the heat. The echo of Jack’s bullwhip is long faded away, and Aestas has taken up her dancing residence here again, Auxo attending and putting on her own show, Ainé and Theros kicking in the chorus as Damia beats out a rhythm that pounds behind the stretching foreheads drying out in the daytime and cooking to deeper browns under fading hat-brims.

The seasons are shallower here, I think, the troughs not so deep as, even if held higher than, in many places. I will do what I can amid such exaltation, sitting in the shade and what cool I can find, knowing I am no longer fit for doing otherwise if ever I was so. Or else I will lay in a fire outside and let it smolder while I sit and tend it and pretend I am some other thing than I am. After all, Robb Walsh has the right of it, and while some perversities are ascribed to me, that one on which he remarks will not be one of them.

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