The Dog Days

One dog sleeps on my floor. The other rises with the sun.

I woke up this morning to clouds over the valley.

I live for clouds out here in this arid and elevated stretch of the sagebrush sea. There is one tree on these 20 acres, and it only offers shade to songbirds, mice, and occasionally my little brown spaniel.

When the sun shines on this little farm, it shines white and hot. The other day, my neighbor and I were lamenting that it’s a defeating sort of sun. It’s the kind of sun that burns you in 15-20 minutes if you’re not careful. My truck often reads 110+ degrees when I step into it. The horses and long ears spend countless hours in their shed or chasing the shade of the barn. The border collie digs cool holes to lie in (much to my dismay) while keeping a diligent eye on his herd. The brown dog wants to be inside more than outside, and inside this tinbox house is not always much better. I have a rolling A/C unit that I pull around with me on the worst days, but for the most part, I make do without it.

Then, there is that which shall not be named: the wind. She deserves to be blown over in italics. I do not say the word aloud for fear of waking the spirit that breathes through the funnel of the Pintlers and the Flint Range.

I envision her as a tall skyward woman with long curly hair who wears billowing dresses. She regularly sends the full glory of her curls and skirted fabric into the sky, across the plains, and up the foothills of the Boulder Mountains that begin just a few hundred yards from where I live. She is both tepid and tenuous, occasionally monstrous in her blowing vanity. She kicks up rolling dust clouds that send the horses galloping for shelter, she attempts to peel back the tin roof of the shed, she shakes the house that I live in with both hands when she’s most tempestuous, and she steals many evenings that should be productive with her forces. My deck has a 6-foot-high wind block on the prevailing side. It’s laughable when she’s in motion.

She turns the heat into a dirt-filled exfoliant. She shifts bearable cold into dangerous, stinging chills. If we leave her out of the picture, the wide difference between 110 and the -58 that the depth of winter sometimes brings is a humbling equation. Combine her airs into the extremes, and I find myself nearly worshipping the constitution of everyone who has spent a lifetime here. This stretch of Montana prairie is not a place for wimps, and I am kind of a wimp, and I have had to face that part of myself here.

So, when I woke up, the sheet of clouds blocking the mighty sun offered immediate reprieve. She continued to sleep; stillness reigned. I wore a sweatshirt to combat the delicious morning chill. I drank my iced coffee surrounded by my yawning and nuzzling equines, freed from the shed on their own volition. I walked across the drive to visit with my neighbor’s buckskin stud colt, scruffing his fluffy baby-soft neck and cradling his Lilliputian muzzle in one hand. I listened to the trill of the horned larks, the song of the vesper sparrow, the chittering of a bluebird. I played ball with the brown dog and the collie.

The brown dog is currently sitting at my feet, the ball not two inches from his paw should I get up. He is a perfect image for my internal understanding of the dog days of summer, this little guy stretched out on the cool linoleum floor, napping the midday away.

When the Dog Star Rises

Canis Major and Lepus. Plate 30 from Urania's Mirror; or, A View of the Heavens (London, 1825). Designed by Richard Rouse Bloxam and engraved by Sidney Hall. You can find Sirius at the dog’s nose.

Arise, dog days of summer. Arise is, in fact, the correct terminology. The dogs we are talking of here are celestial, not earthbound. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that Sirius — the brightest star in Canis Major, the ‘Great Dog’ constellation — rose so close to the sun from July to August that it intensified the heat during that time of year. They determined the dog days to be July 3rd to August 11th, no matter where one was at. The phrase, translated to English over 500 years ago, stuck like glue.

We could nitpick this. Latitude dictates our starry views, meaning that if we’re counting on Sirius rising to indicate the dog days, they’d be different the world over. It is, of course, oriented to the northern hemisphere’s experience of summer. The modern equivalent of the dog days here in my exact location of Montana would be August 20-25, with the star first appearing around 6am, though likely blocked at that time by the mountains surrounding me.

I can get behind the ancient starry hypothesis that summer heat intensifies when Sirius cuddles the sun. We are either lucky or burdened with the current astronomical truth of the matter, but out here on the prairie I’d make up a thousand strange and comforting hypotheses to help me make sense of the extremes of this country.

On this day of reprieve, I will be lucky to get what feels like a hundred things done that I’ve been putting off due to heat and unrelenting weather. I have a house to clean, a barn to reorganize, and two wild donkeys to bother.

This wimp is relishing a cool, still moment. I should get going before she does.

Please do not speak her name.

There is far too much to do today.