The yard is utterly overgrown. I wave to my neighbor through a tangle of grapevine and mow a path alongside the explosion of honeysuckle. Volunteer mulberry trees appear out of nowhere, three feet tall before I even notice them. How can this be?

A far corner of the lot out back goes unmowed season after season, all shaded and wooded and strung with yet more grapevine, Virginia creeper, English ivy. My insurance company tells me it all must go, the insistent vines and intrusive saplings that threaten the integrity of the nearby garage.

This is Indiana, and the abundant flora will have its way.

The Oval One was in town last week. It was billed as a rally, which is to say, a campaign event. It never ends, the campaigning.  Two of my friends were there, dressed as Handmaids in red cloaks and white bonnets. One of them even made it into the venue before being escorted back out to the sidewalk by two men who weren’t interested in parsing her First Amendment rights.

Lock her up, lock her up.

My writing practice is giving me grief; I’d like to blame the Huckster-in-Chief for sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but it’s not his fault. (Surprise! Not everything is his fault!)  I am summered out, lazy and without direction, in need of something I know not what.  I go outside and breathe in the last of the fragrant honeysuckle, and tell myself I’ll cut it back to a manageable size next spring.