bright and beautiful

 Perhaps I’ve neglected to say this and so if you’re not from these parts, you wouldn’t know – we are in a spin of the most beautiful days you could imagine. For this reason alone, I’m glad we did not go to South Dakota (though I suspect that there, too, the weather has been tremendously great... we tend to imitate what South Dakota has already done).

You dream about days like this – where the night is cool and the day starts out cool, so that you wear a sweater and wait for the magic moment when you can let it go. The sun is brilliant, the sky is brilliant – it’s all brilliant. There are no bugs, the breeze is potent but not overbearing, I mean, it’s what we crave the 364 days of the year that are not this.

Of course, it hardly matters. I am on a writing roll. I wake up at night and think of ways to improve sentences and when I get up, I don’t even bother with the delightful little breakfast on the porch thing, I slop the cereal and the fruit into the bowl and I sit down on the couch and get to it. With pillows to support my aching back, because – did I tell you? I threw out my back a couple of days ago and things haven’t been the same since. Especially things that require me to be still and in an upright position.

I took (lackadaisically) a handful of photos today, knowing damn well that the moment would come where I have to post and if there are no photos and no great events or thoughts of events then it all gets mighty dicey at 11 pm, when the Cinderella hour is nearing and Ocean draws a blank.

I was helped by a short venture to town (for groceries: I know things are bad when there’s no milk for Isis, or for my morning coffee and there is only one egg for the bailout dinner should we be needing a bailout dinner). Once downtown, it’s easy to zip to the Union by the lake and to look out at the boats and admire it all and there you have it – a photo that, at the very least, shows off this most exhilarating day.

You’ll think that there should be some dinner photos too? Well, alright, but it’s nothing to hold your breath for. Take-out Chinese.

We did play tennis (as I said – no day shall pass without some movement in it) and after dinner, Ed climbed the ladder and painted a few more inches of trim...

...and I think I’ll end with that. Because I can think of those pedantic types who would just up and paint the whole house in one season. Bu Ed didn’t do that. We left the last bit for this year and he’s dragging it out ‘til the last minute. As if it weren’t a chore at all. As if painting trim (or snipping beetles off of rose bushes, or any number of things we do here, at the farmette) is the very best way to spend the very best evening of this summer season. And maybe it is. Maybe it is.

And really, I just cannot express how beautiful it is out there today.