My Dry July

I had my last beer on June 30, visiting a friend in his back yard. Now I'm having a gin & tonic, minus the gin. Plenty of lime. As July came near, sans rain, I recalled that last July I went dry for the month. I had read something about intermittent fasting in general and not drinking alcohol on an alternating month basis, and how some bars and cafes were catering to this trend, creating delicious cocktails without liquor but fancy enough to be pricey enough for the establishments to survive, etc. We were coming up on our annual extended family vacation, where there is a lot of wine drinking, and I thought, "Why not?" Somebody needs to stay...I was going to say "sober" but what I really meant was "awake."

I haven't exactly gone dry when it comes to poetry, but I did stop posting a poem a day on a little chalkboard in June. As the poem states, I was "out of chalk" from the start, writing with little stubs I found in the kids' art supply boxes and kept in the lid of a jar.

Just the other day, my husband found in the garage a bucket full of colored sidewalk chalk that I'd been looking for in the basement. So there's that for the next public art project that might arise from the ongoing circumstances. And I ordered and received a little box of slim white chalkboard chalk for the next round of daily poems, possibly in September. For now, I'm writing in my various journals, intermittently.

As I've been writing here, I've been hearing thunder! And, look, it's raining out my window! ...And now I've come back from stepping outside to smell the rain, the needed rain, the gentle rain. It's falling on my prairie flowers, my single tomato plant, my little pots of hibiscus tea, my gradual attempts at a very local permaculture. I forgot to plant a little packet of California poppy seeds, but I have plans for it. I have more to tell you, but not right now.