Rain Dance Please
Jennifer Flaten

Greetings from the desert planet of, oh, wait, despite the ridiculously high temperatures, lack of rain and giant clouds of dust, this is still Earth and Toto: I am not in Kansas. I am in Wisconsin.

It is just Wisconsin in the throes of an excruciatingly hot and dry summer. This is different from our usual hot, muggy, buggy summer. If this keeps up, I won’t have to worry about a zombie apocalypse because the unrelenting sun will scorch the zombie right out of their reanimated asses.

Yes, I know I am obsessing about the weather, but it’s so hot. I get cranky when I am hot and when I am cranky I whine. I am pretty sure I could win a gold medal in the Summer Olympics, for weather whining.

Of course, I wouldn’t know exactly how hot and dry it is, because I’ve hermetically sealed myself in my home. I only leave the house to purchase more ice cream and Diet Pepsi; it’s too hot for cupcakes, the icing melts.

I do break the seal to send the children into the hot air. Oh don’t worry, I slather them with sunscreen and give them permission to terrorize the neighborhood with the hose.

This serves two purposes, first it gets them out of the house before one of us ends up dead, my money is on me, they are a gang of thugs when they don’t get outside time, and it waters my plants.

If I just asked the kids to water the plants, they would do a half-assed job, but if I send them outside and let them play with the hose, they squirt everything within a five-mile radius, including my plants.

It hasn’t helped. Let’s have a moment of silence for my poor dead before their time plants.

Trying to maintain a garden this season is an exercise in futility. First, we had a very early spring warm up that was followed by a very cruel re freeze. Now the temperature hovers around 100 degrees and has for the last seven days.

The only thing really thriving in my garden is native weeds and even they look rather droopy. It’s the lack of rain; it hasn’t rained since the end of May. The weatherman, cruel bastard, refuses to show any rain in the forecast. Oh rain, why have you forsaken us?

Our grass actually crunches underfoot, on the plus side I don’t have to mow; yay! On the downside, this place could go up like a Roman candle at any moment. Well, okay that is anytime of the year at this place, but the danger is more so now.

The potential to start a huge fire didn’t stop local communities from putting on their Fourth of July fireworks displays. I know you expected me to say, it was Average Joe down the street with fireworks. Nope, the communities sanctioned it.

Do I really need to tell you how several of these events ended? Yep, you guessed it, with fire trucks  and water, lots and lots of water. Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t reelect the mayor who burned my town to the ground with fantastic fireworks display.