found this photo today, taken with my first Kodak camera, Portland, Oregon, 30 years ago.

. . . . .

The morning was oppressively hot and we aren’t used to it yet. I watered the tomatoes and the sheep, both were wilting, and thought with some regret about how I didn’t swim in the lake this weekend with the girls. Purple lips would not have been so bad.  I wonder how many eggs we will get tomorrow. The hens were listless too. Billy and I tried without success to remove some broken-off fence posts in the barnyard and he was dripping. The pigs stayed in the shade stretched out on the concrete floor. I put a jar of sun tea out on the picnic table in the garden for us and baked a  frittata  early so that we could eat it cold tonight.  Billy had gone today with our neighbor to pick up feed in another county and took hours to get home again. After lunch I heard the thunder in the distance and scrambled to get everyone under cover, eggs collected, tools put away. We had a tremendous storm, flooding our yard with muddy water from the hill, til it was up past my ankles and making a mess of the garden. Billy drove through something worse. Every road on the way home was flooded and blocked by fallen trees and down electrical lines. He had to snake his way west for a long time before he found a clear path to head home.

. . . . .

“Oh I’m just a mountain climber, ” said the gesture,and indeed, it seemed to have come from a hiker being routinely asked what the hike was like and was the weather all right- but what is there ever to say about a hike or the weather?

A Book of Memories, Peter Nadas