This week as our high temperatures have hovered around 100 and it’s been weeks (well, more like months) since we’ve had measurable precipitation, I’ve watched the news stories of the torrential rains and flooding in the South. My friends on the East Coast and my daughters in Chicago have bemoaned the fact that it seems as if summer hardly visited them this year, and I’ve thought more than once that it would be nice if we could somehow stir the weather up a bit and give them a little of our heat while we got some cooler, damper days.  For most of us, unpleasant weather — whether too cold, hot, wet or dry — is merely cause for small talk or minor inconveniences, but as we’ve seen this week, it can be cause for severe economic loss and death. Too little rain and farmers lose crops to drought; too much, and they see those crops swept away or rotting in the fields. Either way, production costs go up and income drops. Transportation and shipping face delays and expensive interruptions, and damage is visited upon infrastructure. In the case of wildfires, such as those Southern California has been battling for nearly a month now, the cost of fighting those fires must be added to the losses of homes, businesses, crops and forests. The human loss, greatest of all, comes to those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and those who seek to protect the rest of us from the fires, floods and winds; and those who experience the loss of their homes and sense of security. All of that came a little closer to home for me this week as we saw not one but two large wildfires in the Rogue Valley this Monday, one at the edge of Ashland and one only three miles from my home here on the east side of Medford. Firefighters, facing 100-degree temperatures and 30-mile-an-hour winds, had barely begun to get a handle on the Ashland fire when a fast-moving blaze sprung up on a hillside adjoining several housing developments in Medford. With the airport between my home and the towering pillar of smoke across the valley, I watched throughout the afternoon as four airtankers repeatedly landed to refill with fire retardant and immediately took off to drop their loads. While I knew our home was in no immediate danger, even as ash and charred oak leaves drifted into my backyard, I couldn’t help but feel dread and anxiety for those who lived on that hillside and those fighting the flames and wind. And knowing how quickly that fire sprung up, I also knew it could just as easily happen in the field across the street from my home. Happily, in this case, no homes were lost and no one was injured in the 600-plus-acre fire that scorched that Medford hill, and it was contained by the next day. Over the last three days, though, we’ve sat under a pall of smoke from two fires burning in forest lands several miles north of here. With the heat expected to continue into next week, no rain in sight and everything as dry as tinder, we know we aren’t out from under the threat of more fires yet. We wait and watch and hope for cool, fall weather and a good drenching rain. –Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader