Help is always on the way

It is morning, and I’m sitting out on the porch. Finally!! I was afraid to sit out here earlier, because the air quality is so poor. It stung my eyes and I could almost taste it. The worst part was that I was so worried about the birds. I worried particularly about the hummingbirds who come to the feeder I have stationed in a ginkgo tree right beside my porch, and I have been offered many hours of pleasure watching them come and have a little drink, then come back and have another. I said to one hummingbird one day, “I think I’m going to have to cut you off!” And the hummingbird said, “Fat chance,” and flew away. So I run a very popular tavern, here, but I worried that I would not have any customers today or, given my dramatic inclinations, ever again.

I drove from the Twin Cities back to Chicago on Thursday, and it was very nearly apocalyptic, what I drove through. Sometimes it looked like banks of fog lying on the land, but it wasn’t fog, of course, it was smoke. And the sky was a worrisome yellow color. It was bad air all the way back to Chicago and when I drove down the main street of my little town, I saw that it was even worse here than what I had been driving through. This has happened before, of course, smoke in the air from wildfires, but the more often it happens the more sorrowful I become. The long drive made for a very sore hip and I’ve been hobbling around in a way that’s like I used to walk when I was a little kid pretending I was very old: limp, limp, limp. (I have to insert at this point but now I AM pretty old, and I walk around pretending I’m a kid. It’s not a bad deal, really.)