Just Weather

“But temperatures are rising…”

     “It’s summer. It’s supposed to be hot.”

     “But I mean, we’re setting records. In Europe, this year’s all-time hottest temperature is 2° higher than last year’s, which was 2° hotter than—”

     “Yeah, Europe. Who cares about Europe?”

     “Glaciers are disappearing. Rivers are running dry. There’s drought everywhere. Hundreds of wildfires are burning out west right now. Up north, too. The air’s poisonous.”

     “There've always been fires in summer. When I was a tadpole—”

     “It’s raining ashes in Michigan today.”

     “There. You see? The rain will put out the fire. Really, kid. It’s just weather.”

Inspired by A Little Bit of Magical Thinking. AI image created by Angus Peterson.

A Little Bit of Magical Thinking

“It’s doomsday,” texts my son about the yellow miasma out there. Close the windows tight. Shut the doors. Put on the fans. Purify your air. Wear your mask. Help the evacuated if you can. Wish the firefighters well. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES reply to those idjits down south who think we’ve given them the stink-eye just to mess with their summer vacations. What would be the point? You can’t argue with magical thinkers. But do, while grinning, envision our crappy air infiltrating his gold-plated office and taking up residence in his lungs. After all, what goes around comes around.

Inspired by Heading Home. Image cropped from a photo by Cole Burston.

Heading Home

I found myself today on one of those crash course collisions with another human. You know the one—you make eye contact from afar, do the dosey doe but invariably end up sidestepping to the same side, as if you were a mirror image of each other.

It can go on for seconds until you stop, laugh (or are annoyed) and continue around. I genuinely laughed today. I wondered if we were magnetically drawn to each other by our atoms and why. What do we share together as two strangers that only the universe knows, prompting us to discover.

Inspired by What the…‽ Image by Etienne Boulanger.

Harold Edwin Doughty

It was a hot summer day in 1910, when Mrs. Eva Doughty caught her stepson, Harold, scratching his name into the bricks of their brand new house on Garden Avenue—egged on, no doubt, by the bad influence that lived next door. And so, the next morning, she walked up to Mrs. Mary Prescott’s stationery shop at 357 Roncesvalles and paid the twenty-four cents for a single insertion of the following classified advertisement in the Personals column of the Toronto Daily Star: 

WANTED—A good home in the country for the summer, where boy of 13 can make himself useful.”

The farm was but a short walk from the station in Emery, but not a long trip at all from Parkdale. John Watson, a widower, lived there with his daughter, Jennie. He was 88 when they responded to the ad, and Jennie—who had never married—was 53. Not a particularly exciting prospect for a teenage boy up from the city, but they promised his mother there was a boy his age—Mary Devins’s son, David—living on a farm nearby. History doesn’t record how Harold got on, but the 1911 census does show he went back the next summer.

Inspired by Mrs. Eva Doughty. Photo by the author.