A hot night, awake with sweat and the poking and biting of “bugs”, but an eventual falling to sleep. The feel of one more crawling on me makes me give up and I turn on the early news out of San Francisco–crackling radio AM in the a.m., giving that flavor of coming from some far off, exotic place–and bring coffee back to bed. I sip in a large moth that in the dark I couldn’t see had bumbled over the lip of the mug. Pppphhhthtwpp! how … Silence of the Lambs.

I admire roadsides of that finest of this wet season’s annual wildflowers, the Summer Poppy that is glowing everywhere; in places its orange petals are entwined with the blue wide trumpets of Tall Morning-glory, these colors with the early sun shooting through them would have moved Tiffany to some new creation in glass. At Mason’s I find the young and still very cute Sonoran Desert Toads have moved away from The Stockpond altogether, spread themselves over the south end of #1 Pasture but especially taking up in the new native grass pasture we’ve planted and that we are now watering every day there is no Monsoon storm of any account. A cuckoo calls from the pond where the tadpoles swam so briefly, though his calling for rain won’t be working during this, one of those five to six day spells between widespread temporales. The skies, the clouds, are most magnificent and sometimes there’s a bit of thunder, but Earth-maker isn’t at the moment roused to anger and I can relax without worry of being hit by lightning. One is caused to raise the eyes often, to see how much it has all changed in the last few minutes, how the sky has piled high itself with clouds that then vanish, threaten and boil up again, vanish again.