It seemed a bit cooler this evening. When the roommate got home with the car, I hauled my butt down to Powder to go for a walk. The air quality is so bad that it appeared as smudges against the sky, with only a bit of true cloud showing through — touched with red gold from a burnt orange blaze of sun in the sky.
At the park, two mothers with their four new babies were frisking about — I wonder how many generations I’ve seen now?
You could smell the green of the trees, and they almost filtered out the acrid sting of the air. I have become more aware of smell lately; when coming back from Branson a century or two ago, I could actually smell rain while driving along with the window down. I remember my nose going into the air as I sniffed the scent, like a bear or a dog. A few minutes later, it started to rain. It was a great smell.
I visited both libraries on the way home from the park and made a good haul on books — my first Clive Cussler, and a couple of history books as well as an old and familiar Anne McCaffrey. When heading back to my car from the city library, I looked up in the sky at the crescent moon, colored rust-gold. Instead of one moon, though, there were two: the original and a faint replica in front of it. Somehow the thick air had created a light shadow of the moon against the dark sky. Is this a premonition? What does a double crescent moon mean?
At home I unloaded groceries from the store and stepped out to pick up my books from the car when a yellow truck with blinking white and yellow lights started coming down our street, spraying all the trees and bushes for mosquitoes. I ducked back inside to avoid the dousing, only venturing out again when the mist had settled.
If I can see a double moon, I have to wonder at the wisdom of shooting yet more toxins into the air. I hadn’t heard anything about an outbreak of West Nile. After I grabbed the books, I did what all good internet children do–came inside and searched on St. Louis and West Nile. I found one suspected death and one confirmed West Nile illness in the last month in the St. Louis area. I wonder, though, how many more people were affected by breathing air thick enough to bounce the image of the moon back at itself?
