summer fever.

The Kansas sky is usually yellowish-gray before a summer rainstorm. Even the cumulonimbus towering over the hill beside our house has a yellow hue. Everything seems quieter when the sky looks like that. There’s no wind. The finches stop arguing and watch the sky from their perch on the young tree in our front yard, and the neighbors’ cows wait in a corner of the field, just standing.

I stand too, my bare feet on a warm, flat rock rock on the path in front of our house that connects the porch and the roundabout. The air is humid and sweet in my nose as I breathe in.

It’s days like this when I miss yellow skies and quieting finches.