Heat Wave

               To escape the hazy, hot and humid wave in our New Jersey suburb we drove out to Sussex. Yes it is cooler out here –by about 5 degrees—outdoors. Indoors here is hotter since the cottage welcomes sunlight all morning. The only remedy is to jump in the lake. But today the lake, basking for an entire week in heat, feels like a warm tub; and there are no waves. No breeze to make any kind of wave but heat. I speculate that fish caught here today may already be half baked. At least the few cool spots I swim through are refreshing. Real cooling happens only when you get out of the water and sit in a wet bathing suit. Still, it’s much more tolerable than the 20 minutes I spent weeding and wilting in my garden this morning.  

                My garden! I am flattering it to call that plot of earth a garden this year. The zucchini borers finished off one plant before it produced a single squash. And each time my string bean plants recover from an attack, a groundhog finds his or her way past, under or through the fence to eat it down to the stalk. They ate the leaves off the other two zucchini plants too, making their production questionable. Most summers, we can count on our garden to supply lettuce and arugula for a nightly salad, this year other creatures have enjoyed it.

                At least the small garden by the lake is supplying salad greens and it gave us an abundance of snap peas before the heat wave finished off the plants. We are expecting tomatoes soon from both gardens. Groundhogs eschew tomatoes.