Really it’s the first vacation I have had in years. I mean just travel and fun and not having to do a reading or a talk, just enjoying myself. Meanwhile I am preparing to go — arranging for animal care, called Rusty Redden to bring a round bale to the lower pasture and Auriel will drop feed into their over-the-rail feeders every morning so they have Nutrena Safe Choice Original, water, salt and free-choice hay. Sooty goes to the kennel because if I leave her in the house with DT he’ll beat up on her. Girl Dog and tomcat DT will stay in the air-conditioned house all day, Auriel to feed them and give them hugs every day. They all adore her.

Sooty peacefully sleeping before DT comes along and pounces on her. Anyway, they love her at the kennel.

It’s 105 but feels hotter. I remember the time in San Antonio, when Jim and I were in the midst of a kind of constructional shambles, with one air conditioner for the entire leaky old place, when it hit 111 F.

This is DT plotting as to how he can torture and abuse poor Sooty.

Horses don’t seem to mind the heat as much as other animals. I’ve seen them lying out in the blazing sunshine at 100 F.+ snoozing away as if it were chilly! At any rate, enough about the heat — my lovely cool room in the Pink Palace (the Ortiz House across the street from the old Contreras villa, which Elvia now owns and cares for) coming up next week!

The heat has been higher, but this is extremely persistent. It’s been at about 104 F for over a week and another week to go. I wrote Elvia in Coatepec that it was 41 C. and she could hardly believe it.

My two horses stand in front of the mist-producing nozzles all day long. All the rest of the critters are in air-conditioning. I am trying to save my trees. All over town people are putting out umbrellas on their fences and gateposts as a kind of joking appeal for rain.

So I am watering my trees a LOT before we are put under water rationing. The dust is pervasive and it’s affecting my allergies but there’s something horribly gorgeous about it all.

Next week I am flying to Veracruz where Elvia and Jaime will pick me up and we’ll drive back to Coatepec which is at 3000 feet, cool rainy!!! I get to stay in the same wonderful room in the big Ortiz house as I did last year. Elvia’s book group is not meeting until the beginning of the academic year but she says she has a lot of reading to share with me, I am still going back and forth between the English and Spanish version of Juan Rulfo’s El Llano en Llamas. The stories are incredibly revealing about the conditions of the common people during the Mexican Revolution. Great reading. Also working on the Great Trilogy, entitled 88.3.

And it’ll be all the way down to 102 when I fly out of San Antonio! A cold snap!