I long ago quit watching my emails as though I was getting nuggets of gold. Mostly, I was getting told about things I needed to do. When I retired that stopped. But the emails continued pouring in. Sometimes there is actually a message from a friend, but those mostly come by text. Email is reserved for people wanting to sell me things or confirm appointments or confirm things I’ve bought. There are more than 500 in my inbox this morning.

Needless to say, I don’t sit down everyday and cull them. Mostly I do it when the number of unread emails gets big enough that it feels embarrassing because part of the work me still exists who thinks it’s a character flaw to let emails go unread and un-responded. Of course, no one else knows how many unread emails I have, nor do they probably care. And if I wasn’t writing about it, neither would you, know, that is.

Anyway, the morning is hot and muggy, which implies there’s moisture in the air and I wish it was in the ground, because almost everything around here looks to be dead and brown. I put a little of the old saved rainwater on the Mexican Plum yesterday, and I’ll do the same by hand for some other plants this morning. But that’s really no way to keep things green. For that you need mother nature and she’s busy at the moment dropping water somewhere far away.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale