Sunday on the porch

A farmhouse Sunday in mid July. Early, (or late, if you’re looking at this from a Saturday perspective), the moon is so bright that you could see animals dart from one field to the next. What animals? Don’t know. When you’re caught by surprise, you miss those details.

A sizzling day. But not yet. The morning is mild, in a humid sort of way.





Time to start cooking. Pastry for the tart, crème patisserie. Need berries, lots of berries. Into the patch I go, pushing past the canes to the good ones, laden with purple and deep red fruit.





Not a complicated meal. Easy. Fresh stuff. Zucchini and spinach frittata. Sausages. Breads, cheeses, rhubarb jam.











And the tarts. Large, small, touched by garden mint.






It is so good to have daughters and friends of daughters here. Their easy manner, without the taint of cynicism or indifference, is so darn fresh and wonderfully fun. Today’s small group stayed at the farmhouse for the night and I thought – this is the very best use of the space here – for their voices and their stories, I’ll make frittatas and tarts any day.





We sit on the porch even though it's getting to be quite warm. But these are city people, all of them. New Haven, New York, Chicago. A farm brunch has to be out on the porch, so that you can look out and listen to birds do their chirpy routines.

For a brief heavenly minute, I have two daughters here.






And now I still have one and she and Ed and Isis and I are out on the porch, watching the fireflies spark and the bats dip and flutter across the not yet dark sky.