Days of Heat and Chalk

Posted on July 13, 2005 in Neighborhood

The mountains look as if an artist took the palest of pale pastels and rubbed them onto a faint smoke blue paper. The windows, doors, and walls of houses and condos lose their definition in the midday sun. Crows circle in the morning, then retire to the long-leaf pines — the only natives — until they see orange again at dusk. Vultures patrol the slants and deadfalls of the badlands west of here, seeking the victims of heat exhaustion and sunstroke. Summer the season of death is upon us again. The artist fills the tablet and then flips the page.