The Daily: 3 July 2025

The Dog Days begin today. This is when Sol and Sirius shine together all day long, creating blast-furnace heat. Or maybe that’s just carbon… Canada is on fire. Europe is boiling. The Mediterranean is as warm as spit. The Pacific Ocean might be ENSO-neutral; but June 2025 was as hot as in any El Niño year, warmer than most. Cities, regions and countries all across the North (and, disturbingly, also down South where it is winter) broke daily heat records, broke records for highest nightly lows, and broke records for the month as a whole. It was the hottest June on record in too many places to list here.

Do we believe in climate warming yet…

How about ecological breakdown? I haven’t seen a swallow, bat, or house martin this year. I can’t remember the last time I saw a nightjar. I did see a few bluebirds and buntings back in early May, but they seem to have moved on. I have heard no evidence of owls, and the foxes are either keeping a very low profile or gone. All in all, there are far too few predators and insectivores around here. And we are paying for that…

On Sunday, I was out in the garden most of the day. I was working on the house side of the street, not out in the jungle. In theory, this is the tamer part of my property. But I was still swathed, nearly head to foot. Nearly…

On Monday, a mosquito bite announced itself on the small bit of neck that had been exposed on Sunday. It itched like hell and was enormous, about the size of a healthy pea with a broad ring of irritated red all around it.

On Tuesday, I started feeling really weird. Achy and disoriented. Weak, like there were no muscles left in my body. Every joint was inflamed and my fingers were refusing to bend. But no fever.

I forced myself to plow through the work day — because there is still literally no body else to do this job — and went to an urgent care facility in the evening. Upon hearing my symptoms the doctor looked at my neck pointedly and ordered blood work. The test results are still not back, but the doctor seemed fairly sure it is West Nile virus. Because that is apparently a thing that is happening in Central Vermont these days…

I do not have a rash or a fever, so I was sent home under orders to head to the ER immediately if fever develops or if the headache gets worse. This disease is not contagious (except if a mosquito bites me and then bites someone else), and the worst was probably over on Tuesday. So I am still working by day. But I am crashing hard at night. And I can’t imagine that I will be gardening much over the long weekend.

But then, there may be nothing to do anyway, because…

I came home last night, worn out from the long day, throat raw from the yellow haze that passes as air, and what did I find? Well, first the lid of the composter had been tossed on the ground. No idea how the vermin accomplished that. I have a hard time shifting it myself. It might have been the work of raccoons overnight, but I would almost swear that it was not open when I left for work in the morning. On the other hand, I can’t imaging a squirrel getting it off… But that wasn’t the worst.

The worst was the flat of healthy winter squash and a few melons, all neatly labeled in their own coco-fiber pots, all hardening off, getting ready to be planted out this week… and all destroyed. Pots were strewn all over the walkway, dirt spilling out like vomit. Many of the plants were broken into ragged pieces. Several were uprooted whole and left to die on the concrete. I swore loudly. (This is becoming a regular occurrence…) Then I set about salvaging what I could. I think a few might survive. Maybe. But I have no idea what they are. Pumpkin? Blue Hubbard? Waltham butternut? Delicata? Well, I might be able to pick out those as their stalks tend to be thinner. But the plants with thin stalks are probably not going to be among the survivors. I guess, if there are any survivors, I will just be “pleasantly” surprised when the fruits develop.

So, there goes weeks of work… a harvest that can’t be reclaimed because we don’t have enough of a growing season left to start over. And the thing is, nothing was eaten. There are no empty pots. I don’t even think there are leaves missing. This was just wanton rodent destruction.

All I kept thinking, in between the steady flow of colorful imprecations and curses, was that we need predators! What the hell were we thinking eliminating all the animals that eat the vermin! Combine that with a case of West Nile disease, a bug-borne virus that should be easily contained if there were still birds to eat the bugs, and I was a frothing pot of rage. We have broken this planet… and ourselves… Forget altruism and the desire to make the world a better place, why are we not spitting mad about how all this is affecting us? Why are we just laying down and taking it? Why are we normalizing this shit, pretending that this has always been the way things are, forgetting that that is not at all true?

Everybody I know is hurting. Why is that not filling us all with rage against this thing that is hurting us!

Because we’re all staring at screens and believing the bullshit we see there… We can’t even add up things like the absence of birds and the prevalence of bug-borne diseases. Or increased rodent predation with the lack of rodent predators. We can’t look at real evidence and draw any sort of conclusion about cause and effect. We’re doomed…

And now, today… the Dog Days are upon us…

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The Dog Days are not named for idyllic summers with our childhood canine companions, as much as I think that’s right and proper. This time of year takes its name from the stars, from one star in particular, Sirius, Canis Major, the Dog Star. This bright blue beauty was named Sopdet by the Ancient Egyptians, Sothis by the later Greco-Egyptians, and was personified by a goddess with a star on her brow and often cow horns on her head. The hieroglyph for both the goddess and the star was a dog, though the reasons for this are unknown as Sothis was never depicted with canine features. (One of those mysteries of history.)

Sothis represented fertility and abundance. When her star merged into the sunrise around this time of year — known as the heliacal rising of Sirius, which, because of precession actually fell around the time of the summer solstice in Ancient Egypt — she brought the rising Nile floods, the beginning of the agricultural season in Egypt and also their New Year. With her consort, Sah, a personification of the nearby constellation that we call Orion, she gave birth to the hawk-god, Sopdu, the planet Venus. She was the lady of bright beginnings. Over time, her story was absorbed by the rising cult of Isis, but songs were still sung to Sothis at the New Year. The Dog Days were good in Egypt.

But the Greeks did not enjoy the heat. They renamed the star Sirius, which may derive from a word that meant “scorcher” in Ancient Greek or may just be a mutilation of Sothis (which also meant “searing fire” in Egyptian). They also demoted Sirius from the embodiment of the supreme fertility goddess to merely Orion’s hunting dog (and, of course, female to male… because Greeks). The Greeks believed that the combined fires of Helios and Sirius, rising and setting together at this time of year, drove people mad. The sea turned into a boiling kettle. Both wine and women supposedly turned sour and bitter. Men became weak. (Oh the horror…) The very air became unwholesome in the scorching heat. The Greeks did not have a wonderful flood of fertile river waters to temper the heat. The Dog Days were inauspicious in Greece.

The Romans disliked the heat even more. Pliny tells us that everything from depression to dog attacks increased during this time of year. (He prescribed chicken manure in dog feed to curb their aggression. Which I’m sure would work, as they would be puking all over everything…) Plagues of all kinds were thought to begin like clockwork on July 3rd, the first of the Dog Days. There were sacrifices just before the heliacal rising of Sirius to prevent crop failures due to drought. Orchard trees were wrapped in white swaddling because it was thought that the heat would bring black blight to the bark. Sounds somewhat familiar, does it not? Perhaps we haven’t been appeasing the right gods recently? In any case, the Romans hated the Dog Days.

But Greeks and Romans never had it so bad. The days of merciless heat that I experienced as a child would have been swoon-inducing to the Ancients. Average afternoon temperatures in Greece topped out around 24°C (75°F). Clearly, they had low heat tolerance. Rome was a bit less congenial. Highs of 35°C (95°F) were not unusual, though, with a Mediterranean climate, nights cooled off rapidly. (That’s the wonderful thing about dry air; it doesn’t hold heat. Does make for cold winter nights though.) Still, Rome emptied out in the summer, with most people heading for the cooler climes down at the coast or up in the hills.

However, neither the Greeks nor the Romans — nor even my younger self — had to cope with long chains of days where the lows never dip below 38°C and the highs can actually cook flesh and the Mediterranean is warm enough to kill fish — which is approximately where we are now.

Because… we’ve broken the planet… faults in the stars and dogs have nothing to do with it.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025