The Hyco river looked particularly sick where it crosses under 58 on Sunday: worm-brown and sluggish, barely any pulse. Early morning Monday spruced it up a little bit with the cool air and a little lace of fog just fringing it, rustling around under the trees that were perfectly June green. For no particular reason, I read about the river when I got home. I found little details about it that seemed special and delightful: that it flows northeast, or that its real name might be Hicootomony or Hyco-ote, musical names that must be more authentic to the first residents of the area, that it first made an English map as the Turkey-Buzzard river because of, well, the turkey buzzards that roosted up over it. Sadder, that in 1964, its waters were stolen up into a dam. Or is that sad? People need dams. Don't I drink the water I think tastes so good in my own little town from a river that was stopped up to make a dam?

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The day before, Saturday, and sitting out in my friends' yard. I had given their daughter a little toy stuffed dragon with some kind of magnet contraption that connected so the tail wrapped around her wrist. I stepped away for a while to help pull some weeds in the garden, and then I got back, my friend prompted his daughter: "so what have you decided to call the dragon?" "Yon!" she immediately replied, with the long oo emphasis. All my friends who had been sitting around unsupervised with her while I was off in the garden turned as one to give me a triumphant look. I guess, if you're lucky, you live long enough to see your friends' children grow up enough to be used to troll you! But it did warm up something in my cold, dead heart.

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I'm sitting on my porch, tossing small snacks to a host of blue jays and crows. The day felt cool, pleasant for running, but now, the rain feels strangely hot.