July is a strange month. The heat rises quickly. Long, bright days filled with the whir of bugs bend time. The garden calls in the lush heat, and I answer, covered in soil and sweat in a matter of minutes. The laundry hung to dry gets washed again in a sudden rain. By late afternoon I am usually spent, and it is time for a swim. We walk across the road or ride down to the rope hole and fall into the dancing water. Its wild cool invigorates our bodies.
I have a litany of chores singing in my head: pick beans, weed, freeze beans, weed, plant the Fall Garden, harvest the bee balm flowers, the hyssop, the mint. I have plans for the land: more blueberries, more raspberries, a greenhouse, rabbits for meat. In the tangle of beans and heat and weeds it is pretty easy to lose sight of why I am doing this. It is easy to forget the joy of it all. But the River always reminds me. Unfailingly she wraps me in her liquid embrace and I am brought back to myself. Deep is the water, deep is my joy.
