The Daily: 10 August 2026

Supposedly, the Dog Days have ended, but you wouldn’t know it by the weather. It has been hot and humid for days, with no rain to break the heat. Not even much of a breeze most days. Just relentless heat. And… well… I’m not going to tell you what temperature wilts a Vermonter and sends her panting down to the cool relief of the basement… Because I know it’s hot everywhere, and it’s much worse just about everywhere else. So, I’m embarrassed at what I seemingly can’t handle. But here in Vermont, we’re setting records of our own. Not only the daytime highs, but also the highest nighttime lows, meaning it’s not cooling off much at night (thanks to the smoke and humidity). It has frequently been above 80°F long after sunset, at least as late as midnight, making it difficult to throw open the windows before bedtime to let the house cool down.

Now, here in Vermont, there is relatively little air conditioning to mitigate the records. I have a window unit in my bedroom and a smaller one that doesn’t get turned on often in my guest bedroom. Nothing in the rest of the house except carefully directed airflow… And my house is average. Maybe above average in that I have the luxury of two window units. So Vermonters rely on cool night air to vent out the daytime heat. And when it’s not cool at night… well… we wilt…

These old New England homes were built to channel weak winter warmth up to the sleeping spaces, not shed summer’s heat, which was just not a thing in 19th century Vermont. My curtains and the wrap-around porch on the southern half of the house (my house faces southwest…) do a fairly good job of keeping sunlight out, at the cost of living in a dark cave all summer. (Which only bothers me sometimes, being a bearish kind of witch…) But I can’t expel any heat generated within the house. So, showers must be short and cool — which is not a real hardship — and next to nothing can happen in the kitchen — which certainly is a hardship as we move deeper into harvest season.

On the last day of July, I took the afternoon off and went cherry picking at my favorite orchard. I got a great haul of semi-sweet cherries. They are a mix of Montmorency and Romeo cherries, which are delightfully small but highly productive bushes. Fruits are dangling in long clusters right at eye-level and lower. Even the kiddos can pick bucketfuls of these cherries. I’m thinking of putting in a hedge of them on the erstwhile jungle.

But then I wouldn’t have an excuse to go up to Cabot under the Mead Moon. And I’d miss the views…

After picking cherries, which took far less time than I would have liked, I headed back down the mountain and visited a farm stand for zucchini (because mine aren’t exactly over-productive yet) and discovered blueberries. So I bought four pints. Of course…

With the ingredients for a delicious Lughnasadh meal, I headed home. And it was a great pot of corn, beans and squash along with cherry scones — but cooking and cleaning up afterwards did heat up the kitchen! Still, that heat bought me four pints each of blueberries and cherries in the freezer and a week’s worth of stew. So I guess it was worth it.

I have not been out in the garden enough. First, I haven’t had much time. I’ve been working too much, thanks to an unexpected halving of the accounting staff. One young guy is following his heart off to Pennsylvania or some such place. Another accountant is moving to a different department. That leaves two of us to manage over forty affordable (translate: “subsidized” and all the regulatory and financial complexity that entails) housing complexes and all the rest of the bean counting duties for a not insubstantially-sized non-profit. I am just drained at the end of each day. I am living proof that a day of sedentary mental challenges is far more exhausting than physical labor. The combination of sitting and intense focus deadens my brain and turns my body into overcooked broccoli… or something like… It takes great effort to make dinner and eat it. It is difficult to read and nearly impossible to write. The idea of going outside and working in the evening heat? Is just too much…

But it’s also not been healthy out there. Vermont is suffering its worst tick season ever, with the bugs even showing up in town. The guy who I hired to cut down the jungle got a few from my property. Two of my co-workers have fresh cases of Lyme disease — and one of them lives in my neighborhood. I’m sort of terrified of what might happen to me if I get something that leads into meningitis. The odds of surviving a second infection in as many years are not great. So there’s that.

Then there’s also smoke from Canadian wildfires, though that has tapered off over the last few days as several fronts have pushed up from the southeast and sent the smoke back across the border. But those fronts have brought humidity, and Vermonters simply can’t cope with that. I really can’t… It makes my arthritis throb… But I’m just not generally adapted to staying cool in a humid climate. I’m from the desert. I can shed aggressive heat as long as the sweat evaporates, but just a little humidity traps all that heat in my sweat-slicked skin. I overheat way too easily. And it’s not just “I’m hot and need to sit down”. It’s tunnel vision and pounding erratic heartbeat and nausea and, paradoxically, given the humidity, rapid dehydration.

I thought this was just me. Because I am from the desert. But I’ve learned that most of the people I know here in Vermont are the same. In fact, heat exhaustion and heat stroke are sending hundreds to emergency rooms up and down this state every week. It’s not that we’re all wilting flowers… Or maybe we are… But I think it’s more that we basically aren’t built to be working in high wet-bulb temperatures. We live here in the mountainous north where winter is fierce for very good reasons. We can’t tolerate fierce summer…

So I haven’t been gardening as much as I should. There is still a pile of mulch that I have to move. The weeds are rampant. Everything needs to be dead-headed. I’m barely keeping up with the watering. Harvest detail consists of filling my pockets with whatever is out there when I walk home from work. And I’m reluctant to look too closely… because whatever I find must be processed. Blanched. Cooked. Baked. Even the tasks that don’t involve heating up the kitchen take effort. Pitting the cherries meant standing at the counter for over an hour (I made yoghurt at the same time to break up the monotony). And all the harvest processing tasks generate piles of mess to be cleaned up. It’s more than I can manage most evenings, where I come home, fix and eat dinner, get on the stationary cycle or the treadmill for a much-needed hour of exercise, shower, and then pretty much collapse into bed.

As you can probably guess, this is why I have not been writing much… But that’s another issue. Suffice it to say that I don’t feel like I have much to say about these times. I’m too scared of what is happening right now to even muster an essay’s worth of snark. Every headline feels like staring into the vortex, the only question remaining is when, not if… So I’m pulling inward and focusing on what I can affect, on what matters to me.

And remarkably, the garden is still yielding delights even its neglected state. So I thought I would share the joy…

And… it’s August… so guess what’s just around the corner!

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©Elizabeth Anker 2026