[Languid June As Seen From Our Back Deck.]

Languid June.  Languid June.  The name has a certain ring to it.  Like Lay Down Sally, Calamity Jane, Black-Eyed Susan, Axis Sally, Typhoid Mary and Moaning Myrtle.  I chose the title of this post with care.  I do believe that I saw a Sad-Eyed Lady at the corner stool in a dusty bar in El Paso in 2013.  I do believe I heard the bartender ask: Same again, Languid June?

But, already I digress.

It’s that time of year.  We had a Spring, but I can’t tell you what day that was.  It certainly wasn’t March 21, the Vernal Equinox…there was still snow on the ground.  Now, it’s summer, only a few days before the Summer Solstice.  I sit on the living room sofa and look out toward the lake.  The leaves are out in full now, so we’ve lost nearly all of our view of the water.  It is uncannily still considering the wind storms we’ve been having.  The fresh new maple leaves flicker almost imperceptibly.

It’s quiet, so much so that you can hear the blood rushing in your ears (or maybe it’s my tinnitus again).  A man and a woman talk quietly as they kayak past our dock.  The crickets buzz on occasion.  The crows squawk away in the near-by woods.  The bullfrogs down at the lake never seem to tire of their amorous croaking.  Okay, sounds like a noisy place…but it’s not.  It’s quiet.  It’s lonely.  It’s languid.

I was a science teacher so I know that just beyond the frequency of our hearing range, there is a riot of activity, in our yard, in the nearby woods and down by the lakeside.  But, speaking only for myself, I can’t report a “riot” of anything going on in my brain.

When I look out at the motionless trees, the only term that comes to mind is Dog Day Afternoon, then I remember that’s a 1975 movie with Al Pacino. It feels like the Dog Days of Summer, but I think that happens sometime in July or August; I can’t remember and it’s not on my wall calendar.

Maybe I should ask Alexa.