The drought last summer left our water supply in a precarious state, and despite a wet spell in late winter, things did not look good
this spring when gardening time approached. The local water table was below normal, La Nina was peaking, the sunspot cycle was at its
maximum, the U.S. Weather Bureau was making ominous pronouncements, and my rheumatism was acting up— everything pointed to another dry
summer. I went ahead and planted my garden— people raised on farms don’t make it even as far as teen-age without being optimistic— but
as Dog Days approached I found myself feeling uneasy. Imprinting as a toddler followed by 65 years of reinforcement is hard to shake
off.
My earliest memories have a lot to do with weather.
As a preschooler I was not aware of the Dust Bowl
conditions in the central part of the country, but I
did know we had droughts every summer in West
Virginia. The only source of water in our house was a
pump at the kitchen sink; it drew from a well in the
back yard. There was a series of summers in the late
1930’s when the well went dry and we had to carry
water for drinking, cooking and washing from my
grandmother’s house about 200 yards away. The
livestock were an additional problem; the spring that
fed the watering trough always went dry even before
our well, so every morning we had to carry buckets of
water from the pump in Grandma’s yard to fill a
washtub for the cows and pony. Grandma was always
worried that her well would go dry too, and her
anxiety was quickly communicated to me.
I must have been 4 or 5 years old when I heard my
grandmother say Dog Days had started and she guessed
we would be carrying water soon. I knew she planted
her garden according to "the signs," which
she got from the Farmer’s Almanac, but she never
successfully explained to me how they worked; In fact,
I don’t know how much she understood herself about
the astronomical origin of the signs. So, following a
child’s logic, I concluded that the droughts were
caused somehow by dogs.
Those were the days when the Rin Tin-Tin stories
were popular, and Grandma had an enormous German
shepherd named Major. He was older than I by several
years, and while he wasn’t mean or dangerous, he
wasn’t playful either; he treated me with disdain. I
wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but I didn’t trust
him. He seemed a likely candidate for the villainous
responsibility of causing Dog Days, though I wasn’t
sure how he did it. Major died in the winter when I
was 6 years old, and the following summer was wetter
than usual. That convinced me that he was implicated
somehow, though I never caught him doing anything more
incriminating than drinking from the basin under the
pump.
Eventually I learned that the only connection Major
had with Dog Days was his name. The brightest star in
the sky is Sirius, whose name originally meant
"the scorcher" because the ancient Egyptians
observed that the time when Sirius rose with the sun
marked the beginning of the hottest time of the year.
Later the Greeks placed Sirius in the constellation
Canis Major, which was the larger of the two dogs that
accompanied the hunter, Orion. Hence Sirius came to be
called the Dog Star, and the period of 40 days or so
when it rises and sets with the sun became Dog Days. I
don’t suppose my grandmother knew any of this, and
even if she did it would have been the farthest thing
from her mind when she selected the name for her dog.
Dog Days arrived on July 3 this year, and a
stationary mound of high pressure has brought
triple-digit temperatures to the south-central states
for the past few weeks; there has been crop damage and
people have died there. But here in Emmitsburg the
predicted drought has not materialized, at least not
yet. My garden is producing weeds with abandon, and a
few tomatoes and cucumbers are starting to appear.
Yesterday afternoon, as I emptied the rain gauge for
the third time this week, I recalled earlier times and
reflected that maybe we’re getting off easy this
year— maybe.
But until August 11 gets here and Dog Days are
over, I won’t feel at ease. Grandma and Major taught
me not to take things for granted.
