image:cloverleafherbs

Shimmering, gleaming, sweltering, steaming, the waves of heat rise up from the soft pavement to swirl amid the branches of the trees, lifting and separating leaf from leaf, fluffing out the billow of the flag on its pole, searing the eyes that scan the horizon for any sign of relief from this onslaught of unnatural air that feels best suited to the breath of a stove-top or the wave from a furnace, white hot in its power to shrivel and fry all it touches.

image:YohoNationalPark

Fanning the air for breath and staggering through the days as they tread through the minutes that fill the hours, the days and the months, lamenting the heat until in time that shimmering, gleaming, the sweltering has caught a cold breath and has intensified in billows of white that spew forth fluffy flakes floating downward to collide with a colder upstream that freezes them whereupon they plummet, ground seeking missiles that can crack a windshield, layer a road with blackness that scatters cars and feet and eradicates any effect of tread so that travelers who dare to venture there are in danger of spinning off in all directions, lamenting the cold as they go.

image:123rf

But that icy air has no power against the turning of the axis that that draws ever closer to a pale yellow ball, and emboldened and enlivened, the tiny seed, the brash stem, the brave bud begin their burst into life and the gray, wet cold and the white frigid air begin their retreat against the bright, brilliant green as it springs forth and buds into beautiful blues and red and yellows and pink and purples that color the world to a softer, vibrant, pulsing, vivid factory of a fanfare of renewal of new birth, of a brand new chance to begin again.  We lament, what took the beauty took so long to arrive?

image:portobellojewlery

Yet when the new chance has fully burst into new growth and brilliant life, the blooms mature only to begin their fade into pollen, their seeds falling to the ground where digging in, they hide against the oncoming onslaught of warm, then hot, then sweltering that burns their flesh and dries up the last remaining vestige of that green world that lived until that yellow ball comes ever closer and turns the air, the ground, the sky into sweltering, withering, un-breathable air.  So the cycle revolves and we hang on, lamenting, yet believing our seared eyes and skin, even our parched tongue will survive, for the orb ever swirls and rotates and this too shall pass.