Fear and beauty in July [by Emma Trelles]

South Florida is the coolest part of the country right now, which is kind of spooky but not so much that I won't take that news as a bizarro blessing. Outside the rain is delicate and softens the world to gray and insistent green. I'd like to make a bouquet of grass or wrap its thick pelt around my shoulders. I'd like to hide in it for a while. My desk is beside floor to ceiling windows and I perch here like an invisible finch, never tiring of the view of trees and tennis courts, inlet and boats, the parking lot, the delivery trucks, recycling and garbage bins slicked clean. The windows sound great, right? But not so much when there's a hurricane. I've watched them bow, glass like lungs taking in and expelling air. If you have lived in Florida all your life, you usually don't evacuate for any storm rated category 3 or under. You are filled with equal parts savvy and foolishness.  I watched Katrina through these windows, days before anyone knew the fear and suffering that would accompany her.  We haven't had any hurricanes this season, not yet, so I can delay thinking about the 42 year old panes busting open, or buying water, sardines, and batteries, or losing hours to the local TV meteorologists. They call themselves storm trackers but I think they are sinister geometry buffs because they love nothing more than conjuring cones and grids and oddly pulled shapes that resemble lethal amoebas or a noxious taffy.

Instead of all that, I get to sit here and ignore deadlines, maybe take my umbrella to the park across the street. There's a hawk that lives there. We named him Joseph, after a bygone mayor of the little city where we live. This summer, Joseph has been observed grooming his wings, lunching on the small and feathered (his beak makes fine cutlery), and terrorizing the mockingbirds who also live in the park but are not so afraid of him that they won't dive-bomb his head in protest. Sometimes I walk through the park listening to the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, my summer anthem album, a gospel record, really, if you think about it. I sing "You Can Get It If You Really Want" and "Many Rivers to Cross."  I  hum "Sitting in Limbo."  Sometimes I stand beneath the canopy of a royal poinciana, which, when in bloom, hazes the space beneath it to a watery and pale red. This summer, I've been working and looking for work, doing and waiting, thinking maybe I should worry more, or less. There's no silencing the reel. I've been keeping modest lists: Go to bank. Call doctor. Hawk, storm, faith, here.