The dreaded “heat dome” has failed to live up to expectations. Rather than settling high pressure over the Great Plains and parching the heartland, as it did in the disastrous Dust Bowl summer of 1936, we currently have a trof there, which is about as opposite a “heat dome” as you can get.

Originally this trof was the tail of a trof the “heat dome” resisted and forced to lift and flatten away to the east, leaving this part of itself behind as a the western section of a “trof split”. Unable to get by the building high to the east, it dug south. As this trof dug down into Texas it created an opening in the ridge of high pressure, allowing Tropical Storm Beryl to curve northwest and then north, bringing heavy rains to Texas. This is not only about as opposite a “heat dome” as you can get, but it creates an wide area of wet earth which will slow the growth of any new “heat dome”.

This trof has basically split the old “heat dome” into western and eastern entities. The western side shows signs of developing into a true summer “heat dome”, and currently scorches California, while the eastern side has far more humidity, and looks like what we used to call a “Bermuda High”, though perhaps the current incarnation should be called the “Bermuda Doughnut,” because of a persistent cut-off low pressure spinning south of Bermuda in the upper atmosphere.

Sometimes these cut-off lows just dwindle away, but sometimes they drill down to the surface and create tropical depressions which can grow into hurricanes. I haven’t a clue what this one will do, and therefore, to hide my ignorance, I’ll just use the “various factors” escape, which sounds like this: “Various factors will determine if it develops or not.” In the mean time I’ll keep an eye on it. Nothing much beyond “an area of disturbed weather” shows on the surface map.

The surface map does not show the same vigorous southwest flow over the east that the upper air map shows, which makes me wonder if the Bermuda High is falling apart, so I check the Atlantic map.

Once you look this far out into the Atlantic the “Bermuda High” tends to be called the “Azores High”, or at least “an eastward extension of the Azores High”. In fact my calling it the “Bermuda High” at all likely makes me a bit of an anachronism.

So be it. I’ve always wanted to be an anachronism. When I was a small child, and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d lisp, “An anachronism.”

In any case, the Azores High is extending east, though the Atlantic map does show the upper air low as that red dashed line. It also shows the true polar fronts have retreated up to the top of the map, where those blue dots show waters that haven’t yet melted last winter’s sea-ice. Despite the nights being brief, those areas can still generate air that can be downright chilly, on a cloudy day. I’m glad it is held north, up by Hudson Bay.

Last but not least, the map shows a wandering stationary front crossing the Atlantic and then straggling down the east coast. It has a flimsy High Pressure behind it. However this basically separates warm air from very warm air, and dew-points in the 50’s from dew points above 70. They are summertime fronts, and I suppose have some official name such as “sub-polar fronts”. I’ve described a couple in past posts, and how they rescue us from heat waves with refreshingly dry Canadian breezes. I’d call them cool, but temperatures can still be up in the 80’s. However the last one was so weak it hardly counted. It took forever to push south, and even after the wind shifted the air remained humid, and it took another twelve hours for “mixing” to gradually dry the air enough to notice. Even then, it never dried as much as prior episodes of Canadian air had done, and the air almost immediately began to grow more humid again.

The reason this system has such a hard time pressing south was that the south was pressing back so hard. I won’t ask you to remember the upper air map. Here is a clip focusing on the strength of the southwest flow.

To have a cold front come charging by, you want a northwest flow, but this southwest flow was so strong it split the last trof, and now the back part of the trof can make little headway east against the flow, and instead likely will be squished north and weaken and flatten, perhaps even to a point where the remains of Tropical Storm Beryl are pushed west of us, and we barely get clipped by the resultant tropical rainstorm. However we won’t escape the humidity.

The strange thing is that I knew this southwest flow was building, even without all my dratted maps. Some things you just feel in your bones, because you are old, have decades of experience, and are an anachronism. (By the way, the meteorologists of yore spelled “trough” as “trof”, because (I suppose) the traditional spelling seemed ridiculous. So I stick to that 1959 meteorological spelling, in my attempts to be an anachronism.) (Although spelling the letter “f” with “ugh” is an even more ancient anachronism.)

However I didn’t need to attempt anything or make any effort, to sense we were in for a spell of heat and humidity. I just heard a voice in the back of my mind say, “Bermuda High’s got some strength this year,” (with stress on the words “High’s”, “strength” and “year”, and the word “year” made into two syllables and pronounced “yee-ahh”, as the old Yankee lobster-men did.)

In fact I wonder if the entire concept of a “Bermuda High” is a relic of some earlier lobster-man jargon, perhaps “Bermuda Fogmaker” or “Bermuda Trades”. After all, when the weather bureau was first formed it was still the age of sail, and some of the canniest, when it came to weather lore, were the sea captains.

And just like that I’ve done it. I’ve allowed my mind to go to sea, and catch the sea-fever.

In hot July farmers can sit, because
The corn's in the ground; they just watch it grow,
But what have I planted? I won't write memoirs
If they grow nothing new. Who cares what I know?
We want a new song, not dull stagnation.
We want summer seas, and to go sailing.
Even Indians went on vacation
Building middens of clam shells, while wailing
And dancing to Indian songs: The Dutch
Said the coast sparkled with their camp fires
At night, as they sailed by. I sweat the touch
Of sea-fever. Of all men's desires
The greatest is restless; to go sailing on,
And seek a new sea, and sing a new song.

Hot, humid weather is not a good time to pace around, suffering wanderlust, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. It suddenly occurred to me I’ve been stuck in town for months. First I had to hold the fort because my wife broke her ankle, and then, as soon as she started hobbling about, (making it look strangely like a swagger), she went rocketing off to Maine to be a godsend to my son and daughter-in-law, watching three little girls as they had their fourth child; so I got left behind to hold the fort some more. Not that it was particularly difficult, with the great staff we have at the Childcare during the summer.

What was difficult was the hot and humid nights in an empty house. Outside the heat lightning flashed far away, and fireflies flickered close by, and occasional tannerite explosions boomed in the hills declaring the independence of teenagers, and I paced around the house brooding.

I got to thinking how many clans of Indians in New England would trek to the beaches, leaving the old folk who didn’t feel up to the hike behind, to tend the corn, with the dogs. There were not many deer to deal with back then, and the primary threat was raccoons, who, long before the corn was ripe, wanted to dig up the herring which was buried at the bottom of each hill of corn.

In my mind’s eye I could see it: The dogs patrolled the fields as the old timers gossiped, hoed, and watched the corn grow. The hoeing was done with poles which had either a small triangular stone, or a big quahog shell, affixed to the end as a blade, and hoeing consisted of scraping the dirt around the hill up onto the hill. Most of these fields have been bulldozed flat now, but even as late as 1900 there were still a few fields in New England filled with rows of bumps, proving that the indigenous people could cultivate even remarkably infertile sand, with the help of herring. (The word “menhaden” is derived from the Indian word for “fertilizer”; the herring you ate were called “pogey”, by the local tribes.)

However the old Indians who, like me, were left behind had the company of other old timers, and I felt a bit lonesome as I paced around with sea-fever. And even their corn was nourished by the sea’s herring, and the broken seashell blades of their hoes were found many miles inland, proving someone returned from beaches with shells for blades. The sea’s influence extended far inland. But I thought that, if I was an old Indian, I would have gone to the beach, even if I had to hobble all the way with a cane.

To aggravate me further I couldn’t trust my old Jeep to make a lightning dash up to Maine to see my new grandson, as the 25-year-old clunker has developed a problem with its water pump, and boils over if you drive it more than than a half hour, especially in hot weather. So I was marooned. Marooned not on an island, but inland.

As the upper clouds began to persist from the south of west, and my intuition sensed the “Bermuda High” was growing, my mind began recalling all of my escapes to the shore.

My boyhood summers by the sea were a sort of salvation, a healing of wintertime traumas. And when abrupt poverty forced my family to sell our summer house, I spent a time plunged into gloom. However once I was able to hitchhike, I always seemed to involve the sea in my seemingly aimless wanderings. In a strange way land, to me, suggested slavery, while the sea suggested freedom.

Many others used their freedom to invent gadgets to free themselves from toil. Why push a lawn mower when you can ride about on one? Why rake leaves when you can blow them across the lawn? Why lug a ladder when you can ride up in the bucket of a pneumatic cherry picker?

Part of being an anachronism is to grouse about the old skills being forgotten. People forget how to hammer a nail, with the advent of nail guns, just as people forget how to forecast the weather, with the advent of computer models. However progress overpowers. I may be the last one to own a maul, and spit (some of) my own firewood, as the pneumatic power of a wood-splitter has seduced most everyone else.

The development of modern pneumatics has changed everything, giving clunky machines like snowplows amazing dexterity. I can remember when the fellows repairing the electric lines after a storm drove trucks with banks of big ladders on the tops. Now the fellow who makes ladders must be going out of business, for those same trucks hold a single pneumatic cherry picker.

However, when I think of my own life, I can’t see that the privilege of living in the land of the free has caused me to invent a single labor-saving gadget. I was initially avoiding labor, (that is for sure), but wound up doing a great deal of it, and in the end even had a strange love of it, and felt pain when old age robbed me of my ability to break a good sweat. Now I can hardly sweat when temperatures approach 90 and dew-points 75. But I can pace about, and can wonder, what was I seeking? As I used the freedom given me by the blessed land of the free, what was I seeking?

To some degree I think it was the healing I experienced as a boy, by the sea on vacation.

Yes, I was spoiled: A lucky little boy,
For my mother knew how resting can heal
And liked luxury. I knew sublime joy 
When school closed, and the disgracing big-deal
Called "discipline" vanished; simply vanished.

My mother let me sleep late; until noon
If I wanted. Discipline was banished
As long as I, humming some hit song's tune,
Poured my own milk on my own cheerios.
I didn't wash the dish. Yes, I was spoiled.

Yet now I wonder where a boy's thought goes.
How could I lay there 'til noon? I have toiled 
So long I have forgotten the feeling
Of letting rest drench my body with healing.

Abruptly I decided that, if I could hitchhike from Maine to Montreal at age fifteen, there must be a way to get to Maine at age seventy-one. Maybe hitchhiking has gone out of style, but perhaps I could just pay an Uber driver. It didn’t really matter who the driver was. Just sitting in a car was part of the process, whether the year was 1968 or 2024. Then, once I got to Maine, I could be photographed holding my grandson, and then hitch a ride back with my wife and be on time to open the Childcare on Monday.

Meanwhile my son was facing the constant crisis called fatherhood. I well remember it, having once been the father of five. As he is now the father of four, the apartment he moved into, back when he was the the father of one, has definitely become too small, but rents, and the cost of a house, have gone through the roof. He needs to move but can’t afford it.

When I lived in Maine back in the 1970’s shore-front property was expensive, whether it was by the sea or by the lakes, but between the shore and lakes was a big stretch of farmland holding splendid old farmhouses which hippies could buy cheaply (and attempt to turn into communes). Those days are gone. My son could not find a house between the shore and the lakes that didn’t cost nearly a half million dollars. It is a crazy situation afflicting all our young families, caused in part by greedy corporations which have bought up hundreds of homes for no reason beyond greed.

However he did hear of a house he could afford, down in New Hampshire. He heard about it because it is right beside mine, and he decided to dash down to look at it. This was very convenient, as I could hitch a ride with him back to Maine.

Then I briefly was swept up into the breathless pace of fatherhood. I had hardly noticed how slow I was getting, but was swiftly reminded.

Glancing about the house, it was evident my wife had been absent for a week. It seemed wise to hide the evidence, and I was just finishing up washing dishes and loading up my Jeep for a quick trip to the dump recycling center, and was wiping down counters when my son can breezing in. He had to have jumped from bed at 4:30 AM to have driven down and arrived so early. He seemed to immediately comprehend I was hiding the evidence, and immediately joined me in wiping down the table, giving me a swift report of the seventeen things he planned to do that day. In the humidity I was already ready for a rest, but before I knew it I was scrutinizing back rooms of my neighbor’s house with my son.

I think I’d been in that neighbor’s dining room perhaps five times over the past 30 years, for various Christmas parties, but now I was hearing all about things such as the condition of the cellar floor or attic insulation when they moved in, in 1979. It was a fascinating tale; one that likely deserved to be lingered over, but my son, while not impolite, was in no mood to linger. Therefore I was a bit surprised that, after a brisk tour of the house and yard, he asked to do the tour a second time.

I used that as a excuse to escape and rush off to the dump recycling center. The workers there were a bit surprised to see me, for I usually come rushing in just before they close, however now I rushed in just after they opened. The place was practically deserted, and they all gathered around and I didn’t even have to get out of my Jeep. I just handed them my carefully sorted bags.

You might think such attention would make me more relaxed, but already the sun was beating down and temperatures were soaring. The map showed a front had passed, and indeed winds had shifted to the lightest drift from the north, but all the front had achieved so far was to remove the cloud cover and make the sunshine stronger.

Ordinarily I would have congratulated myself for getting that chore done so early, and rewarded myself with a snooze, but as I arrived back home I found my son amazed at our crop of wild, black raspberries, (which I encourage in my yard), and adding a new chore to his crowded list. If we hurried, he said, we could pick a quick quart and make some black raspberry ice-cream for his daughters when we got back to Maine. Therefore, rather than a snooze, I found myself staining my fingers purple with raspberry juice under a merciless sun.

I also found myself noting that I don’t add things to my “list” like that, any more. In fact, if possible, I subtract things from my “list”, and often, if it is impossible to subtract them, I put them off until tomorrow. However it was impossible to procrastinate with my whirlwind of a son. After we had our quart of black raspberries I threw my sleeping bag and a raincoat into his car, grabbed my notebook and stuffed it into a briefcase holding my sunhat, some COPD medications, and six pens, and we zoomed off to the Childcare so I could feed the animals before departing.

At the Childcare my son noticed my one successful crop, which is edible podded peas, and he rushed over to pick a quart of them for his daughters, as I huffed and puffed about getting the chickens, rabbit and goat extra grain and water, in case I was late returning on Sunday. Then I collapsed into his van and we rocketed off to Maine. As I caught my breath I had to confess I really liked getting the heck out of town.

I then had two and a half hours to talk with a talkative son, enjoying the fact he has a free mind, grounded in morality. (I always think to myself that I didn’t so much teach morality to my children, as tell tales of what a shambles immorality made of my life. In any case, my sons seem far less stupid than I was, and seemed to be able to face fatherhood at a far younger age than I was able to do. I couldn’t shoulder the joyous burden until I was thirty-seven, yet my eldest son amazed me by doing it at nineteen, and in many ways doing better than I ever dreamed of doing. And now I was driving with my middle son, who now has four children and is considering buying a house, at an age when I was ruined, and still sleeping in my car.

As we drove we chattered about all sots of things: The craziness of the Trump-Biden debate; Israel’s struggle to survive; various biblical subjects; the strangeness of some of Kim Clement’s prophesies; but one thing struck me as significant:

Once we got to Interstate 95 and headed north it was impossible not to notice the southbound traffic was, mile after mile, bumper to bumper and barely crawling. To me this seemed odd, for back when I lived in Maine the traffic was bad on Sundays, when people departed at the end of a weekend, but this was a Saturday. My son explained that many vacation cottages are rented from Sunday morning to Saturday morning, so the units could be cleaned Saturday afternoons before the next renter arrived. The huge number of cars traveling south represented all the people who had paid for a week of sea breezes, displaying the thirst Americans have for freedom, and demonstrating why renting out any attic or refurbished chicken-coop you own is such an important part of the Maine economy. It also explained why rich people were buying up all the houses, and young fathers couldn’t afford them. Owning property was a good “investment”, as long as the rents stay high.

We turned from this rather grim topic to something I found amusing.

I don’t much want to write memoirs because my past is a sort of dunghill. I want to move on, because the future holds hope, and my children seem better than I. Why should I look back? It seems almost morbid, to dwell on my debacles.

Yet my son insisted that is exactly what I should do. He has enjoyed the slow process wherein, when recounting the past, I initially spared him the sordid details, because I didn’t want his childhood soiled, but as the years past he grew more able to hear more accurate accounts of my stupidity, until now he is old enough to hear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He has seen me sit back with my bothers and laugh over our stupidity. I was misguided, but received good guidance from the School of Hard Knocks, and there have been evenings when, with close friends, and with discretion loosened by a few beers or a glass of wine, I have made friends roar with laughter recounting how I learned things the hard way. On such occasions my son was all ears on the periphery, hearing the uncensored versions of what I had censored when he was younger. And now he urged me to write such tales down.

I was in no mood to agree. I was on the road again. I was looking ahead, not behind. Even at age seventy-one, a man wants to grow, not stagnate.

I expected a household of chaos when we arrived, but it was nap-time, and the women were whispering. I tiptoed in, hugged my wife for the first time in a week, and ate a delicious meal provided by a local church lady. The only child available was the baby, who was not awake, but who was brought to me and placed in my arms so the obligatory pictures could be taken. As usual, the new baby seemed incredibly tiny, and I was, as usual, uncomfortable holding such a frail glimmer of life. It seems incredible such a tiny man could grow to see what I’ve seen, or to see what my son is seeing….And likely to see what neither I nor my son has seen.

Oddly, into my mind came a vivid picture of my grandfather smiling. The child is named after him, yet he would most definitely be an anachronism by now, though he was modern for his times. But when he was born in 1888 there were no cars. No airplanes. No telephones. There were “new” modern inventions, trains and telegraphs, but 50% of all Americans still lived on farms. He did live long enough to see man land on the moon, but he can’t have imagined cell phones.

The infant opened one eye and caught a blurry glimpse of me, an old man with a white beard, and quickly closed his eye and grimaced. I handed him back to my son, who handed him to my wife. My son was studying a book that had an old recipe for black raspberry ice-cream, which was one thing they knew how to do in 1888. I lay down on the couch to take advantage of the quiet, which I knew wouldn’t last. I was thinking about the world my grandson might see, and thinking maybe I wouldn’t want to see it. Too computerized. I was contemplating robots picking berries and making the ice cream when I nodded off, which is something I seem to becoming very good at.

I woke to the sound of small girls hoarsely whispering they mustn’t wake grandpa. Opening one eye, as my grandson had done, I saw my wife in an armchair, buried in a small pile of granddaughters. The older one, who has seemed to progress from toddler to girlhood with amazing speed, was scientifically observing I snored very quietly, as the smaller twins giggled, until I swung my feet from the couch and, plopping my feet firmly on the floor, sat up. Then they looked at me with awe. `

I am “awesome”, I suppose, because I am less close than my my wife is, with the grandchildren. She insists upon being part of their lives, for they own a large chunk of her heart. She uses modern technology to “face time” them though they live miles away, even reading them bedtime stories, and my kids don’t resent my wife’s “face time” intrusions into their lives, for the grandchildren become so engrossed in such bedtime stories that their parents get a break, and can do stuff like wash the dishes without interruptions. But me? I’m just a person with a big white beard who occasionally appears in the “face time” background, and waves. I suppose this makes me something of a mystery.

However this also explains why my wife was devastated by the unpleasant custody battle which saw saw two of her grandchildren taken from their mother in Brazil, for ninety days this Spring. Thank God that is over, and those two children are back with their mother, and can bask in showers of a grandmother’s love.

I suppose I seem cold in comparison, but the prognosis when you have COPD isn’t optimistic, and it seems a bit cruel to develop a bond with the young, when it will likely soon result in grief. So I try to withhold my heart, (but the little thieves steal it, even when I lock it up in chains.) However I do get a certain respect, by being more distant.

The funny thing was that even my wife, after a week of being a godsend, was hungry to become more distant. She was planning to leave earlier, but had to wait for me. I was in no hurry to leave, however. I was sort of enjoying watching my wife under a pile of granddaughters. They grow up so fast. But then the girls got distracted by hunger, and I got to watch them eat edible podded peas, and black raspberries, staining their faces and fingers. My son had to cut them off after a pint of the berries, to save a pint for the ice cream, but I knew I’d taste none of that ice-cream, for my wife wanted help bringing her stuff to the car. Nor would I even see the sea, though the air smelled of it, and was wonderfully cooler. It was 74 in Portland and 86 inland, but before I knew it I was in a car heading into that inland heat…(cue the music)…on the road again.

We were heading across Maine to the west to visit her brother, who is building a place in the foothills of the White Mountains, across the border in New Hampshire. This meant we took the back roads, avoiding the Interstate, which is the major north-south route to Maine. It seemed a good day to avoid that route, with the traffic bumper-to-bumper on the southbound side between Portsmouth and Portland, and instead to tour the back country.

One thing I’ve noticed, crossing such landscapes before, is that every little town seems to have its own unique character. Each village has its individual history, its booms and its busts, its times when it was blessed by good people and its times when it was cursed by the corrupt. I likely could spend a lifetime, if I had one to spare, just roaming from town to town, hearing the histories the people would tell. (Both the history printed in public pamphlets, and the histories heard-about in bars.) But for the most part I would simply listen. I have no desire to butt in and convert people to anything. Each town is its own particular mix of individuals, minding their own business (most of the time), and, judging from how things looked, getting by. Some towns had more people interested in flower gardens, and some towns had more people interested in repairing cars, but that was their business and not mine.

But it did occur to me that the houses I passed did not look like they were worth a half million dollars each. That was a distortion brought by outsiders. People think they are “investors” but to me the people buying up properties seem like a sort of wrecking ball.

What is their aim? To make houses so expensive that all the young must be tenants, with “investors” lording it over them like medieval dukes? And does not that reduce free people to serfs, who the “lords” can demand be evicted from lands they don’t own, like the Scottish royalty did during the Highland Clearances? How many ancient towns in Scotland vanished off the map, because the lords felt it was more economical to raise sheep? And “investors” think that can’t happen here?

What is their aim? Profit. They could care less for the families in little towns. What they care about is this: The bottom line on a sheet of paper describing their investments. But does this make “investors” any different from the English exporting food from Ireland even as the potato crop failed and the children went hungry? Those investors got their “profit”, but did so even as a million Irish children died, and the Irish never forgot it.

So what did that “investment” actually gain Britain? The Irish had been some of their best troops, but they lost them. Come to think of it, they lost the Scottish Highlanders as well. But that is what greed gets you. Like the old song says, “You think that you’re winning when your losing again.”

But perhaps this is just me being an anachronism, a grumpy old man stuck in the past. I like the individuality of little villages, but the Globalist vision of a world without them, is more “profitable”.

As we pulled into my brother-in-law’s I had to admit he’d done an amazing amount of clearing on his land, with modern gadgets. A front-end-loader with a backhoe is faster than a pick and shovel, especially when your getting old. In the sweltering late afternoon and early evening he showed me around, and then we sat down in a screen house to escape the evening mosquitoes, sharing an adult beverage and chatting.

He’d kept enough trees to cast the yard in deep shade, but a single lone sunbeam found its way, slanting through the haze to a leveled area of clay, and he discussed the poor percolation of clay. Above us the sun still shone high in the treetops, and a chorus of birds were starting their evening concert up there. One song in particular rang out, and when I wondered what bird was singing he took out his cellphone, pointed it towards the song, and asked the phone what species was singing that song. It was a scarlet tanager, a gorgeous bird seldom seen, because it spends most of its time in the tops of forests.

This led me off to a sidetrack, describing how the woods where I grew up were so thick it offered few views; few hilltops free of trees where I could scan the landscape, and this led me to become a great climber of big trees. Most felt this was a strange pastime, but I had one good friend, when I was a teenager, who was of like mind, and one time we discovered a massive old wolf pine in the woods and were challenged to climb it. The climb took an entire afternoon, and made a good tale, but the point of the tale was that at the top of the pine, which thrust twenty feet above all surrounding trees, the birds of that ecosystem seemed astonished to see us. Especially the crows. They’d come flying up to the treetop without a care in the world and then, when they abruptly spotted us, practically do mid-flight somersaults, cawing like crazy. It was not a sight you see every day.

Of course, I was young then, nineteen years old. Now I was an old fossil and couldn’t even walk up a steep hill for the view. My brother in law smiled and said I didn’t have to, as he had rented a pneumatic gadget he used to take down trees from the top down, in small and manageable pieces, to avoid trees crashing the way one did thirty years ago. We both laughed at this, which of course made his wife curious about what happened thirty years ago, which made a good tale (which I may write down, but not this evening.) Our discussion moved on to how beautiful his secluded yard would become when the leaves changed in the fall, and how we should hold a family gathering, with tents and campfires in his woods, but my mind kept returning to thoughts about the pneumatic gadget.

Sure enough, early the next morning, after sipping a coffee in the screen house and comparing the morning chorus to the evening one, I got to go on the gadget. (My wife, who does not like heights, absolutely refused to go.)

The thing does sway a bit, extended up six stories. I mentioned to my brother-in-law that this was the first exciting thing I’d done in the longest time, but mostly I just absorbed the view.

We were above the treetops on a hill, and hill after hill extended to the White Mountains in the distance, with shining lakes between them, and a few steeples marking where the villages lay. Each range of hills was more faded by haze, becoming dreamy in the distance, until Mount Washington was just a suggestion of light purple along the skyline. To the east the sea was invisible, but the haze was brilliant.

But what was most striking of all was a mystical feeling a fine view always gives me. Where I suppose a globalist would poke a cynical nose from a window, whether it be a castle turret or a skyscraper, and lust to own and control the view, I simply sense something to big to own; a Oneness. It does not need control because it is already created and already One.

I'm not downcast, though flowers are fleeting.
Already the plump peonies have past; 
Are avalanching ivory, defeating
A part that wants time paused. They don't last
But I won't ban them. Now the day lilies
Bud coral to startle for only a day,
Splashing like fireworks. Does it displease
The Creator flowers refuse to stay?
No. To Him we too are perishable
And brief as blooms. My generation
Thought we'd change the world, but were just able
To splash and be ripples in the setting sun.
Fleeting are flowers, and all we have made,
But God smiles while watching His passing parade.