Cherry Tomatoes by Anne Higgins and the Perseid Meteor Shower

My little fence garden in June.  My cherry tomatoes were in that bucket on the corner.  The garden is fried now and is only stems and wilted plants.  I planted early and beat the grasshopper plague that hit, thank goodness.  The little bastards ate my Mint and even my Comfrey.  I don't use poison in my yard so I tried my cayenne pepper, Dawn, tobacco mixture and they thought it was seasoning to spice things us.  They even got to my blueberries.  But we got some veggies and berries put up before the heat and plague hit.  I'd never be a good Buddhist because I smushed as many of those grasshoppers as I could.  Tee-Hee.  More came.  I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere. 

If you're a star person, tonight is the Perseid meteor shower.  For over 2000 years, it's appeared annually around mid-August.  A good thing about August---no a great thing!  We are of the stars.  And of course, after no clouds all summer, it's raining today and was cloudy last night, too.  Maybe it'll clear up and we can see some fireworks in the heavens. 

Happy Friday!

Love & Blessings,

~Marion~

Cherry Tomatoes
by Anne Higgins

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.
I sit on the ground
in the garden of Carmel,
picking ripe cherry tomatoes
and eating them.
They are so ripe that the skin is split,
so warm and sweet
from the attentions of the sun,
the juice bursts in my mouth,
an ecstatic taste,
and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
sloshing in the saliva of August.
Hummingbirds halo me there,
in the great green silence,
and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.

from: "At the Year's Elbow"

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More information about the Perseid Meteor Shower from:  http://www.chiff.com/science/perseids.htm
 
The Perseid meteor shower is an annual meteor shower that is extremely regular in its timing and can potentially be visible for weeks in the late summer sky, depending on weather and location.
 
The Perseid meteor shower is named after the constellation Perseus, which is located in roughly the same point of the night sky where the Perseid meteor shower appears to originate from. This is a useful naming convention, but not very accurate!

The source of the Perseid meteor shower is actually debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle. Every year, the earth passes through the debris cloud left by the comet when the earth's atmosphere is bombarded by what is popularly known as "falling stars."

When and where to look for Perseids:

Because of the way the earth hits this debris cloud, the Perseid meteor shower is much more visible in the Northern hemisphere.

People in Canada, for instance, can see the meteor shower by mid-July, but generally there isn't much activity at such an early date. Throughout Europe, the US and the rest of North America, meteor shower activity usually peaks sometime around August 12th, when it is not unusual to see at least 60 meteors per hour streaking across the Northeast sky.

The meteors are certainly bright, but they are actually only tiny objects, usually no more than a grain of sand. They travel at speeds of 71 kilometers per second, however, which helps these small particles put on such a brilliant show year after year.