I’m reading Tuck Everlasting again. Tonight I was grabbed by this paragraph about late summer that could be describing our neighborhood, and much of California and the West:

The pastures, fields, and scrubby groves they crossed were vigorous with bees, and crickets leapt before them as if each step released a spring and flung them up like pebbles. But everything else was motionless, dry as biscuit, on the brink of burning, hoarding final reservoirs of sap, trying to hold out till the rain returned, and Queen Anne’s lace lay dusty on the surface of the meadows like foam on a painted sea.

As you can read and see in the news, in many places we have passed over the brink, with more fires than I can keep track of engulfing towns and forests. We are hoarding hope like sap and holding up our prayers till the rain returns.