THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

 by Judy Ann Davis

The Dog Days of Summer in Pennsylvania are those hot, humid days at the end of July and on into August when the temperatures reach the high eighties into the nineties. Growing up on our farm in Pennsylvania, the Dog Days meant hurrying to get the last fields of first cutting hay, dried, baled and into the barn.

Haying season in the Northeast typically begins in early June and continues through the summer and early fall, with multiple cuttings possible depending on the weather. Despite the blazing sun, the tiredness of the work, and the prickly hayseeds and stalks adding to the discomfort, summer and haying season always brought warm memories to store and hold dear.

Before we bought a baler, my father first used an old horse-drawn hayloader attached to the back of his 1932 flat bed truck that was once a milk truck. The driver of this set-up slowly maneuvered the truck up the rows of hay, making sure the tires straddled the raked windrows. The hayloader with its many tines grabbed the hay and moved it upward where my father, using a pitchfork, spread it evenly on the load.  It was then unloaded, lifted off the truck by a pulley and large fork on a track inside the barn.                                                     

From first grade onward, I was the driver. My brother had been born in January, so my mother was busy tending to him. I loved the outdoors, smell of fresh dried hay—and I loved machinery and its rumbling sounds, despite the smell of gas and oil.

Because the driver can’t see the load once the window opening behind him is covered with hay, I learned to listen to my father’s shrill whistle which meant to immediately stop. I would have to half-standup, jump one foot on brake and the other on the clutch. Usually, his whistle was for various reasons like he needed more time to spread the hay about, or a black racer snake came up onto the load and had to be pitched off, or the loader wasn’t operating correctly.

There were many, many things I learned living on a farm. Too many to tell here. But the first one is that farming is dangerous. You learn to follow directions early in life and do as you’re told. Breaking a rule can result in injury or death.

Many people ask whether it was tiresome and hard. Yes, at times. Especially during the Dog Days. After all, who’s fond of working in 90+ degree heat with hayseeds sliding down your back and sweat running into your eyes?

But it was also fun. And at the end of the day, there was always the satisfaction of a chore well done. . . even if you were just a kid. 

IT'S CHRISTMAS IN JULY!  

HERE IS A LINK TO "JUNE - THE PIANIST"  

JUST $0.99

 

Your Heart is Listening by Liz Flaherty

 "Be gentle with your words, your heart is listening.” ― Carol 'CC' Miller

I wrote the bones of this post five years ago this week for another blog. Let me just say that I'm really sorry nothing has changed for me. I'm a little horrified that five years ago I was complaining about writing slow and ... guess what ... I'm even slower now!

The truth of it, what is really the same, is that I need a gentler time. Getting honest about it, I'm a wuss to end all wusses. I want people to be nice to each other, to care about each other, to laugh together until their stomachs hurt. To never lie or propagate other people's lies. (To keep the honesty going, it took me three tries to spell propagate correctly. But I so love words.)

No, I'm not going to talk about politics. I would, and I often do, but not on this blog. But it's politics that have made me long for the gentler time I mentioned above. It's the stream of hatred and name-calling and let's-offend-or-hurt-anyone-we-can that makes what is unarguably a hard time so much harder even than it has to be.

If you are affected--as I obviously am--by the political climate, how is it influencing your reading and writing? I'll tell you about mine, but I'd love to hear about yours, too.

My writing is already godawful slow. That has come with age for me, and I don't like it, but it's better than stopping, so I live with it and it's not getting any faster as I go along. However, I enjoy it in ways I never have before. I don't worry about pleasing an editor, although I hope I do. I don't do it for the money--which is a good thing--so speed isn't an issue. So, yeah, I just write. And enjoy. And find comfort. And gentleness. Not everyone wants comfort and gentleness in the stories they tell, but I do.

Then there's the reading. I still read new stories, but I spend more time on old ones. I just downloaded James Herriot's All Things Wise and Wonderful and have listened to Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Anne of Green Gables on audio while I walk each day. I've re-read some Mary Balogh Christmas stories--my favorites--and some Pamela Morsi historicals. I've re-visited Cheryl Reavis, Cheryl St. John, Kathleen Gilles Seidel, and Kristan Higgins.

2025 - I'm still doing this, although I'm also listening to many new audiobooks. I get attached to certain writers--Sarah Morgan is one--and listen to both their recent releases and their old ones. I also still have auto-buys like Nan Reinhardt, Marta Perry, and several others but admit I am becoming notoriously hard to please. 

Although this time in our lives is anything but gentle, its rendering in books is still a wondrous gift from authors to the readers who need it. I thank them all for it.

I have to admit, though, that it's just me. I realize thrillers and horror and books-with-mean-people are very popular. I'm so glad they're available and that everyone is free to choose what they want to read. They can even do it without having to say how much they hate one genre just because they prefer another one. 

So what are your preferences? Does my quest for gentleness and my nearly year round reading of Christmas books drive you crazy? Do you wish Stephen King and Lee Child could clone themselves? Is the memoir your choice? 

You know, just asking. If you answered five years ago, I won't remember. 😀

Since you're here, I have a Christmas in July special. The Dark Horse is an old favorite, available now for 99 cents. 

In THE DARK HORSE, widowed Chloe Brewton has made a life for herself in Christmas Town, Maine, teaching literature and being the drama coach at the high school. Although she’d loved her husband and their life in the army, she doesn’t really want to start over with someone else, but when she meets Major Row Welcome, in Christmas Town to spend the holiday month with relatives and decide about his future, she feels stirrings of old wishes for happily-ever-after. The attraction is mutual, although the last thing Row wants is to try marriage again, plus he’s about as interested in having a family as…well, he isn’t. But then there’s Connor Michaud and his three younger siblings. Oh, no. What now in Christmas Town? 

https://a.co/d/5vwZd7N

My Father by Bea TIfton

 I got the call at 2:00 in the morning. Phone calls at that time of night are never good, and this one was devastating. My father had passed away in the hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

When I was a little girl, I idolized my father. He went out of town for his work as a defense contractor and I anxiously awaited his return. Each year we went on vacation. We loved going to San Antonio, but we also went to Washington, D.C., California, Arizona, New Mexico, among other states. Dad often went to Europe for work and one year we went with him, visiting Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and England. Dad wanted us to experience every country we could, even if it was just for a day.

When he was younger, he loved to sing silly songs around the house, off key but with much enthusiasm. Before we went on vacation, he would always sing, “We’re on our way to somewhere, the three of us and you.” My favorite was “Be Kind to Your Web-footed friends, for the duck may be somebody’s mother. Be kind to your friends in the swamp, where the weather is very, very, dawmp.” I’m not sure where he got some of his little gems, but I just loved them. And I can’t hear Peter, Paul, and Mary’s song, “Lemon Tree” without hearing his voice singing it. Now it makes me tear up.

One day, out of the blue, when Dad and I were the only ones home, he asked, “Want to make popcorn balls?” Of course I did. He didn’t use a recipe; we made popcorn and he made syrup to coat them. After we had shaped the popcorn balls and triumphantly placed them on waxed paper, my mother came home. As she surveyed the piles of dishes and the counter that we had effectively shellacked, she gasped and clutched her pearls. It‘s a good thing she didn’t have a weak heart or we would have lost her. Cleaning up the kitchen wasn’t as fun as getting it dirty, but the popcorn balls were delicious.

Dad loved to fish. Being a rocket scientist can be a stressful job, but when we were on the water he just let all that stress go. I didn’t fish and my mother sat and read. I looked for turtles, watched the birds, and just looked around at the peaceful lake. When Dad was through fishing, he would take a couple of laps around the lake and I loved that more than almost anything. We saw some amazing things when we were in the boat. When we lived in Florida, we saw a manatee and Dad carefully maneuvered slowly around him. And once we rounded the curve of the lake and an entire flock of flamingoes took flight. I still remember the sense of wonder as I watched the magnificent birds fly away.

Dad had an amazing life. He was extremely intelligent, and his interests included history, paleontology, archeology, especially of the Anasazi culture, Biblical archeology, history, astronomy, and meteorology. He would patiently answer my questions and he just knew a lot about a lot of things. He couldn’t talk about everything because of his high security clearance, but he still had plenty of anecdotes. He walked away from two helicopter crashes, he walked off one flight as some highjackers walked on (no one was injured on the flight and they went to Cuba), he had several patents for things that were used in his work and he actually invented a cow EKG to discover why cattle were dying on cattle trucks. He was headhunted to work for NASA for the first trip to the moon but he didn’t want to move to Houston. He was always fascinated with rockets and I wondered if that was why. And some fun things are he worked at the radio station in Lubbock when his classmate, Buddy Holly, came in to record. He rode on one flight with Elvis. Dad didn’t try to push through the entourage and talk to him but he said a woman sat in Elvis’ lap the entire way.

There are already things I wished I had asked him, stories I’ll never hear. I think, “Oh, I need to tell Dad,” or “Dad and I can watch that movie together.” Then I remember.

I love you, Dad. And I know you loved me, too.

 

 

Photo Credits: 
Dad with a baby Bea, personal collection
Manuel Munoz "Lemons Growing on Tree Under Sunlight" Pexels.com
Dad with a good catch, personal collection
Shuttercraftsman "Beautiful Flamingos in Turkish Wetlands" Pexels.com
Lilburn Smith 1937-2025

Holding On, Letting Go — and Finally Choosing Me ~Sherri Easley

Most of my life, I’ve been someone who holds on to things that do not serve me.

I hold on to people long after they’ve drifted or betrayed me. I hold on to jobs that drain me. I hold on to routines, roles, and responsibilities out of loyalty, out of love, out of the fear that if I let go, I’ll lose part of myself.

Maybe you know that feeling—that stubborn ache in the chest when something isn’t working anymore, but you just can’t bring yourself to walk away. We’re taught that letting go is failure. That endurance is noble. That the more we sacrifice, the more worthy we are.

But what they don’t tell you is that holding on is its own kind of prison.

You wake up one day and realize you’ve stayed for the title, the paycheck, the history, the shoulds. You look around and the spark is gone. Not just in the thing you’re clinging to—but in you.

And so, after years of giving, building, proving, and staying longer than I should have, I’m choosing something different- I am choosing me.

I decided a couple of weeks ago to give up my corporate job at Boeing. I owe them a lot. I literally started my life over- at least financially, 10 years ago with nothing but my education and experience and my work with them has allowed financial stability, a home, and has allowed me to build a small business around my sewing and embroidery.

Retirement, for me, isn’t an ending. It’s a return. A return to curiosity, creativity, and quiet mornings and snuggles with my pets. To projects that don’t come with deadlines. To joy that isn’t tied to productivity. To the version of me that existed before I became what society required of me.

In this case, letting go isn’t a weakness. It’s wisdom. It’s recognizing that growth requires space—and sometimes that means releasing the things (and people) that once rooted us, so we can rise.

So here’s to the art of knowing when to hold on—and the courage it takes to finally let go.

I’m not done dreaming. I’m just dreaming differently.

And it feels like freedom.

WHERE THE WAGON TRAIN BROKE DOWN By Caroline Clemmons

One of my favorite songs opens, "Summertime and the livin' is easy...." In spite of that, summer is my least favorite season. Please give me spring and fall with more moderate temperatures.  I donate my sunscreen lotion to the sun lovers while I choose to remain indoors with a good book and soothing music.

That's what I'd choose, all right, but life doesn't work that way, does it?

Once we had a dark blue car with the same color leather seats. We kept towels in the vehicle to sit on when wearing shorts. We also threw a towel over the steering wheel if we had to park in the open. Nothing like fastening a molten metal seat belt buckle over a child, right? Car manufacturers have caught on since those days, and the interior of modern cars are not quite the roasting pans of the past. 

I live in North Central Texas, and we have many extremely hot days. Once when friends from Tampa visited, the temperature was 113F, unusually high for us. Their ten-year-old son asked me, "Why do you live here?"

My usual reply to this complex question is, "This is where the wagon train broke down."

I'm still not a fan of summer. 

Procrastination and Obsession

I've been procrastinating something for a very long time, and when I finished it this week, it wasn't all that hard. Because of course. 

I think because my day job (I work at an elementary school) is so emotionally draining, that I procrastinate the creative stuff. Then when I finally buckle down and do it, I get mad at myself since it was never as big or bad as I thought it would be.

And on that note, I sent off my novella to my formatter! She's going to make it pretty and I'll get that baby uploaded ASAP! I'm listing it as free for the first week it's available, but I'm not telling anyone except my newsletter subscribers, so sign up now if you want to be one of the first to get it! It'll be one whole dollar after that first week, so jump on it!

Sign up for my newsletter here

I recently started watching My Demon on Netflix. It's a K-Drama about a demon whose powers get accidentally transferred to a woman who has an assassin out to get her. The thing is, she thinks he's a weirdo who won't leave her alone so she wants nothing to do with him. But! He's constantly saving her life, so he needs to stay close to her. OMG it's forbidden romance, it's enemies-to-lovers, it's Paranormal Romance, and it's hitting all the right notes for me. So, that being said, feed my new obsession! Send me either book or show recs that fit this Paranormal Romance vibe! Please and thank you!

Look at him all broody

Look at them all being enemies and stuff

And now look at them battling their attraction...Swoon...

So yeah, watch it, send me recs, you know what to do!

Summer Sundown by Liz Flaherty

In a town close to where we live, the arts council hosts the Summer Sundown series, where music is played for an hour each Sunday night. You take your lawn chair and sit and watch. You drink the complimentary water, get a free ticket to win a go-cup (which I haven't won) and you listen and applaud and talk to the other people there. Sometimes, like this past Sunday, it was so hot I was whining almost as loud as Sarah and Ron Luginbill were singing. (Sarah was hot, too--it wasn't just me.)

Now--surprise, surprise!--I am not a summer person. Once I no longer had kids in summer sports and activities, I was done with it. I just stay in the house most of the time, and hurry between it and the air conditioned car if I have to leave it. I consider any temperature above 80 degrees to be wholly unnecessary, high humidity to be a death threat from a ticked-off Mother Nature, and summer storms to be ... well, exciting, but also scary. 

Regardless of my complaints (which are fully justified), I have to admit that Summer Sundown is a delight all its own. Not just the weekly event in Logansport, Indiana, where we move our lawn chairs over and over to avoid the attack of the slowly falling sun, although there's a specialness to those performances. But no, it's the sundown itself. The few moments in time that make you say oh, look and stand in silent amazement until the sun slips into the horizon. While I have always been a sunrise person, the end of the day brings something with it. 

We talk about closure a lot, and it gives us that. We search for beauty in every day--it gives us that. For those of us who draw life and joy from color, the night sky and the summering of the earth gives us both strength and succor. Summer and its glorious sunsets bring us ice-cream days, baseball games and swimming pools, and gatherings when we revive, renew, and share memories with friends and family we don't see often enough. 

We share music and fireworks, water fights and slow swinging on the porch, lightning bug watches and strawberry moons. Did I say I wasn't a summer person? I know I did, and I really do like spring and fall better, but that does nothing to take away from the year's middle months and its sundowns.

As a writer, I have to laugh about the seasons, because writing usually doesn't "land right." Here at the end of June, I'm finishing a book in the Christmas season. What I write in December often follows a summer romance. Many times, I write about summer and fall together, because I love the transition time, but I actually am not sure when I write them. 

Right now, in a Book Funnel special, The Summer of Sorrow and Dance, is on sale for 99 cents. It's one of my favorite summer stories ever, and I'm sure Dinah and Zach enjoy more than one Summer Sundown.