Boy, it was a pretty day today. We got an absolutely incredible rainstorm on Sunday night — the kind where the lightning has strobe-light-frequency and the thunder sounds like quarter sticks of dynamite going off — and that appears to have signaled the temporary end of the stinking heat wave we’ve been dealing with. The birds, which had fallen silent in the suffocating heat, have begun to chirp around again. Not like you’d be able to hear them over the oscillating schwa-schwa-schwa of the cicadas. But then, it’s always like that at this time of year. It’s late summer, by gum, and they own the airwaves.

It’s kind of amazing that they can make so much noise, but then they’re big insects. When I took Clementine out at the end of day, she was amazed to discover an exhausted cicada sitting on the sidewalk, no doubt looking for a little peace and quiet in which to shuffle off this mortal coil. No such luck. Clementine is part coonhound, but she’s still mostly goober. She ran around the depressed cicada, making “Watch out, here I come again” feints about a foot away from it. This is Clem’s killer instinct at work. By exhausting herself without inflicting any real damage to her prey, she cleverly bores them to death.

But where one life ends, another starts. Or maybe — I’m not sure. When I went out to bring in the trash cans this morning, I spied a little, white broken egg on the ground. Looking up into the tree, I made out a disreputable-looking nest. So do we have birds so slovenly that they lost Junior before he even hatched? (”Sweetie, didn’t we used to have four eggs?” “Shh. Days of our Lives is on.”) Or is this an old nest with an old egg that eventually just fell as the nest decayed? Another mystery of the Wild Kingdom.

So that’s August 15. Hope everyone had a similarly lovely Dormition Feastday.