82  br falls 29.82 2mph NNW dew-point 63  sunrise 6:22  sunset 8:02  Lughnasa

Waning Gibbous Corn Moon

Started “The Street” last night. It is by Ann Petry.  I found it while hunting for good books on the novel.  A literature professor recommended it as a gritty, realist account of life in Harlem circa 1947, or post-WW II, a neglected work of genius.  After the first chapter, I can see she was right.  It is literally gritty, opening with a young woman looking for an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in a vicious wind that throws dust and sand from the gutters into her eyes.  She wants the apartment to save her brother, Bub, who is 8, from her father’s girlfriend who gives Bub gin.

Further into “Maus” and it continues to amaze me, not only with the detailed account of the author’s father and mother and their extended family during the years preceding WW II and the war years, but with the uncomfortable honesty with which he portrays his father and his second wife, Mala.  This contemporary honesty seems to underwrite the veracity of the European story.

Late afternoon and the sky has become cloudy.  The transpiration cycle bundles moisture from the plants and the soil, the lakes and rivers and pumps up, up, up until it meets the air transports dew point.  It then goes in to clouds and, if conditions are just right, thunderheads form and the water returns, perhaps to the same place, perhaps somewhere else.