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 again. More than 130 active blazes are darkening the skies and sending smoke trailing southeast (so… here…), with the vast majority of the fires listed as “out of control” by the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. In my country, the Aspen Acres fire in Pueblo, Colorado, a notable one of many active US fires, is at 50,000 acres and still growing. It is listed as 100% uncontained. Meanwhile, most of the temperate North is boiling. Estimates of European heat-related deaths in June are in the thousands. The US is set to break records for the hottest 4th of July celebration in history on our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If we come through the weekend without hundreds to thousands of heat-related deaths, it will be a miracle… or evidence that people are in no mood to celebrate, risking death for fireworks. And looming on the horizon, the Pacific Ocean is cooking up an El Niño that far surpasses any we’ve experienced as a species, indicating that the worst of the summer’s heat is yet to come. And yet, globally, last month was the hottest June on record.
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 May and early June, but they seem to have moved on. I have heard no evidence of owls, and the foxes are once again keeping a very low profile. Haven’t even heard a yip from the den to indicate that they’re still present. All in all, there are far too few predators and insectivores around here. And we are paying for that…
Last summer I suffered a bug-born disease that turned into meningitis. I’ve only just paid off the medical bills from that, to the tune of over $15,000 — after insurance! I had a high-deductible insurance plan that did not cover the steroids I was prescribed. On top of that, I missed so much work I needed to “buy back” vacation time so I could spend the week of Labor Day with my son and parents (the latter of whom bought plane tickets well before I got sick).
This summer, I seem to have picked up something very like Lyme disease. I had a bug bite with a faint ring. The urgent care doctor said it was just a bite and not to worry. She refused to test it even when I asked for a test. (Why else would I have gone to the doctor over a bug bite!) A few weeks later, the bite is still visible, but the rash is long gone, and whatever it was has settled into my joints. The rheumatoid arthritis is almost cartoonish. I wake up in the morning and my knees or fingers or wrists will be ringed with blobby fluid. There is a constant headache and an irritating clot of nasal drip in my throat. And I feel like I’m wearing a lead-lined flak jacket, carrying a thousand pounds of fatigue on my shoulders. I’ve been managing without drugs so far, drinking turmeric, ginger and tulsi teas by the potfuls and just moving slowly. But I can’t help but be concerned about a reprise of last summer.
And speaking of reprises… For the second year in a row, rodents tore up my carefully labeled and beautifully organized plants that were hardening off to go out in their garden beds on Memorial Day. This year it was the nightshades. Now, no animals eat nightshades except humans, and we don’t eat the leaves and stems — it’s called nightshade for very good reasons. So there was no reason to molest those pots. Maybe water, except it hasn’t been dry enough for water scarcity. (Just the opposite… we’re all eyeing these puddles nervously wondering what’s breeding in them…) I’m just putting it down to “squirrels are assholes”. At least this year the plants were all large enough to survive. And I caught the mess first thing in the morning. So, after crying a little, I quickly put them all in the ground where I’m happy to say most are thriving… except for the few that were eaten by the groundhogs (I hope there was severe indigestion after that…). Sadly, I have no idea what plants are what since the labels were tossed willy nilly. The paste tomatoes are probably scattered all over the garden rather than being in a neat, easy-to-harvest row. The chiles are wholly potluck. No idea which are the Sandias and Chimayos and which the jalapeños. I do think I’ve got the eggplants separated from the sweet peppers, but I would not be terribly surprised to find corno di toros in the eggplant pot…
All I keep thinking, interlaced into the steady flow of imprecations and curses coursing through my brain (and occasionally out my mouth), was that we need predators! What the hell were we thinking eliminating all the animals that eat the vermin! Combine that with the crushing heat this week, the smoke, and the mounting losses from fire and flood, and I am once again a frothing pot of rage. We have broken this planet… and ourselves… Forget altruism and the desire to make the world a better place for the future, 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…
dog days
standing in dog days heat
she considers laden canes
what to do with this windfall
perhaps
a recipe from grandmother’s hands
a ferment to defer to other moons
a trip to the compost bin
where does the garden get off
flooding the kitchen
with this
abundance turned feral
thorn and red stains
and pains if eaten in this excess
where a bowl is praiseworthy
a vat becomes curse
but it’s vat or naught
as the cabbages are gnawed to oblivion
and the courgettes turn marrow
as soon as her back is turned
she mumbles imprecations
because it’s either feast or famine
when sirius strengthens the sun
and feasting only works
if you can eat it all…
The Dog Days… For me, this name evokes childhood afternoons spent with my collie, Toby, reading under the fig tree, swimming in river pot-holes, and generally doing as little as possible. I have never loved summer best. I’ve never liked heat. Nor did Toby. We invented all sorts of escapes. Mind you, this was before central air conditioning was common. The best AC was at the library… where Toby was not allowed. The most we could hope for otherwise was the window unit, rattling away in the upstairs hall that spat out a tepid breeze with such an acrid chemical scent that Toby would be sent into sneezing fits. Which was only amusing for me. Until the dog snot landed on my face.
So we made do in the Dog Days of Summer. We both listened for the ice cream cart. We learned the schedule of shadows. We napped through the late afternoon sun. I’m not given to nostalgia and don’t tend to look back uncritically to Halcyon Days. But today, as I was reading about triple-digit temperatures in Brooklyn and engulfing wild-fires in Alberta, I realized that we had it pretty good. Me and my very hairy dog in the Dog Days, sweaty and grumpy and smelling ripe. We were, nevertheless, content and busy and healthy. So we had it much better than kids do today. Toby and I, we’d never survive the Dog Days now. The days I remember as mercilessly hot — August in Midwestern humidity, June in New Orleans, July in Phoenix — would hardly be noticed in this climate. Might even be considered cool.
But 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 hated the heat. 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 loathed 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.
©Elizabeth Anker 2026
By My Solitary Hearth 