When the temperature climbs above 100° F here, a cotton T-shirt will dry on the line in ten minutes with a light breeze. A pair of denim jeans dries in about twenty minutes, a heavy terrycloth bath towel in about the same time. Without a breeze, drying takes an additional five minutes, and jeans and towels come off the line stiff and reluctant to fold, as if pressed and starched.

Last night, our local newspaper reported that we have had 18.2 inches of precipitation so far this year. For the month of August, we're up to a whopping .61 inches. Our deficit for the year is 4.45 inches, and for the month is 1.59 inches. Unwatered lawns go dormant here at this time of year, browning out in the heat and drought, and their caretakers mow every other week (if at all) until rain and cooler temperatures return in late September.

This year, those who prudently watered and fed their lawns throughout the summer find hordes of armyworms laying siege to their yards. The little buggers seem to appreciate the lush media of a wet lawn and migrate to greener lawns from dormant lawns such as mine.

I'm not going anywhere with that. I'm just mentioning it, okay? Apparently, aging brings with it not only a new appreciation for AM radio, Saturday afternoon naps on the sofa, and maintenance-free haircuts, but it also fosters an interest in the amount of rain that has fallen on the lawn, and a curiosity about the types of vermin that infest lawns.

Speaking of aging, I called Mom in Houston this week. We didn't have much new news to share this week because we had spoken just last week when I called to thank her and Dad for a very generous gift they had made to Joshua for his college expenses. I called this week to wish her a happy 74th birthday. After we traded information about the rainfall and the vermin that infest lawns, I feigned some interest in her reports about her local (Houston and Austin) grandchildren, and then we hemmed and hawed and scuffed a figurative toe in the dirt before ending the conversation, successfully side-stepping once again her implicit question about my having bred so far from her home.

Taylor is as interested as anyone in rainfall and vermin but lately he has been more interested in the fourth Harry Potter tale. He has been lugging the Potter book back and forth to school to read in free moments. His teacher (who has taught all of our boys in fourth grade) allows the kids to go on to other work or to other reading when they finish their assigned work, so he's been racing through the math and social studies worksheets to carve some time out to plow through the Potter.

I did suggest that he interrupt his Harry Potter reading this summer with Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, a work I think would be more challenging for him. He dutifully read it for me and he says that he enjoyed it, but it wasn't the same, yaknow, Dad? And it was too short. Part of the appeal to him of this latest Potter (at 734 pages, it is the longest book he has attempted) is that it offers great chunks of plot to be gobbled up with plenty more left on the plate after you've swallowed. That's a paraphrase of his description, by the way.

His recall of the details from his reading of the stories amazes me. If you had to choose between him and me to crib all your knowledge of the stories, you should choose him. There are too many "yada yadas" in mine, and very few in his.

His friend hyphenated Ben was over here yesterday after school when I brought up the picture in Yahoo of the trio of youngsters who will play the lead protagonists in the movie version of Harry Potter. They agreed that Hermione and Ron were completely wrong, and that the kid chosen to play Harry was way too regular looking, lacking as he does the cool scar on the forehead.

I do not lose sleep over matters such as rainfall or lawn vermin, but something has caused me to sleep fitfully for the past week. It might be something seasonal. Monarch butterflies have followed the milkweed south to our latitudes, and the lazy chirps of crickets are beginning to break through the buzz of the locusts now and then, a sign here of summer's end.