One of my mother’s final paintings, before Alzheimer’s put away her palette and brushes for good, was this lightning-bright landscape. You might think, looking at this picture, that she lived in an old-growth forest. She did not. She lived in Madrona, an old Seattle neighborhood where stately Tudor and Queen Anne homes mix closely, sometimes just a few feet apart, with modest mid-century houses like hers. The best thing about her home was its stunning view: Mt. Rainier to the south, all of the middle Cascade Mountains to the east, and Lake Washington glittering in the foreground. This is one of the few landscapes she painted that stepped beyond reality, putting a forest in the place of rooftops and lighting up the eastern sky with a sunrise that appears to be bursting forth from the heart of a blazing forest fire.

She probably painted this in the mid-1990s, before smoke and fire became regular summer visitors to the always-green—or so we thought—Pacific Northwest. Now, in 2026, this painting looks to me like August personified. No muted grays, no misty rain; it is a fiery sky reflected in a dark-edged lake fringed with a forest that is starting to burn.

 Oh August. You are the month that used to be the sparkling standout of the Pacific Northwest. Now, you’re like an aging beauty who is becoming ever more fragile. We don’t want you to go. We could easily have said goodbye to November or March. But August? We grieve. And not just for our own idyllic corner of the country. Ticks and tornados and floods and storms are plaguing the Plains states and the East Coast, while fires torment the West. Across the world, floods and landslides are overwhelming Nepal and Tibet.

 It’s as if Mom could see the future when she painted that painting. As if she wanted to let go of her usual gentle, pastel palette and get out some colors that might wake us all up to what lay ahead.

August 2026 was still dazzling, here in Seattle, most days. We’ve had some smoke, but nothing like what the towns in the mountains, and east of the mountains (Spokane in particular) have experienced. There’s rain ahead in the ten-day forecasts, which I am following closely, because I have friends visiting soon, and I am crossing my fingers that September will be a different story.

 Climate change is here to stay. We know that. It is, and will always be, our entire planet’s ongoing, life-threatening illness. And what’s hard this particular year is that we have to juggle it in the worry centers of our brains with a constant stream of other looming troubles. Iran. ICE raids. Measles. The price of gas. The ballroom. You get my drift.

But here’s a good-news August 2026 story: one that is very close to home, and one my husband and I could not have predicted. Early this year, Rustin finished a documentary called The Last Picture Shows. It’s a love letter to small-town cinemas in the West: the many that are gone, the scrappy few that remain and are still beloved anchors in their communities. And the darndest thing has happened: people want to see this movie. They want to stay for the Q&A and talk about it afterwards. They want their own local cinemas to survive and thrive and not be bullied by the strange rules of film distribution. The Last Picture Shows is poignant, it’s emotional, and it’s not about politics.

 I think my mother would’ve loved it. As a moviegoer who was also an avid traveler and a fan of travel guru Rick Steves, she would have especially loved the fact that Rick just bought the historic cinema in his own home town—Edmonds, Washington—and is now celebrating the purchase with a week-long run (through September 3) of, as he put it, “a great little movie called The Last Picture Shows.”

Thank you, Rick. And thank you to all the theater owners and managers who have welcomed Rustin’s “great little movie” during this smoky, steamy August, and will continue to welcome it across the country, and in a few foreign countries, in the months to come.

            Click here for a full list of upcoming screenings.