"dog days"

Summer here is stretching out in hot, humid days, a moisture in the air that feeds not the wilting plants but feeds the deadly fungus on the rose leaves and provides molecular H2O rides for mesquitoes. We watch squirrels stealing drinks out of forgotten water vases on our back porch, never noticed by our varmit hound, who's passed out under his red chair. It's too hot to enjoy the cosiness of bedclothes; we all sleep under fans on "hi" and thank God in our haze of sleep for the mild a/c we use at the missionary level of 81F. It's almost too hot for eating, but for revelling in ice: iced water, iced tea, icy beer--depite the dieticians advice to drink at room temps to balance the bodily temperature. While we give thanks for electric lines and freezers, the obvious modern coolers, I think its more about water, the substance without which we'd be dead as the hard casings of worms who tried to cross the pavement and fried up brown there in the sun.