Siriusly, the Dog Star

Well, the weather has been gorgeous and cool thus far this August, not wilty and muggy and hot, but we are still celebrating the Dog Days of summer over at Escape Into Life, today with The Dog Star, featuring several more poems with dogs in them, and fabulous mixed media art with various animals by Martine Roch! Here's one of them, the dog star herself! (With equal time for cats below...)

Seriously, the dog days are associated with Sirius, the Dog Star, which got its name, Wikipedia tells us, from being the brightest star in the sky (seirious = "glowing" or "scorcher") and its nickname from being part of the constellation Canis Major (Greater Dog). For the Egyptians, the appearance of Sirius coincided with the flooding of the Nile, a good thing; for the Greeks, it announced the potentially hot, dry days of summer; for lots of us, by now, it has come to be associated with those long, hot, muggy or dry days of summer when even the dogs are too tired to get up. And, as man's best friend in the car, there's Sirius satellite radio.

I love the connection of Sirius, the Dog Star, with Isis, the Goddess associated with Cleopatra, a recent obsession of mine! And the Egyptians, of course, loved cats!