By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I tried to avoid politics this week, looking for a break from the havoc that seems inherent in this season’s news cycles, currently amped by all this chatty Gemini energy. I’d planned to ignore all but the headlines, while getting the tomatoes out of their containers and into the ground. It never happened. Days of deluge and thunderstorms brought requisite lightning and hail accompanied by on-again, off-again tornado watches to the Pea Patch. That’s kept the action inside, forcing me to wrestle four restless dogs and an insistent Miss Kitty, who prefers to hold court with her motley crew of suitors rather than stay clean and dry inside.
To complicate things, let’s not forget the sweat-inducing heat signature that is moving toward the East coast even as I write. I’ve never made the leap to tolerate mind-dulling mid-western humidity, which leaves me wrung out like an old dish-rag and moving like a sloth.
Still, I’ve taken some comfort that it arrives mid-summer, leaving me a spring in which I feel energized, and not as though I’m breathing underwater. But not this year; this year “hot” came early, bringing “wet” with it, proving that whatever you thought you knew about weather is moot now that ‘extreme’ is the new normal. Remember when Katrina was an anomaly? Now CNN spends as much time trailing behind storm trackers and reporting weather disasters as dogging recalcitrant politicians.
So the tomatoes won’t make it into the ground until June, putting harvest farther into the future, but who knows how that will look when we get there! The baby lettuce survived that late snow a few weeks ago, and a layer of chicken-wire has protected them from the hail, but now they’re being hard pressed to survive wilting heat. I keep my wings crossed that they will make it to the salad bowl, but who knows. We are firmly in the “who knows” era, otherwise known as “transition.”