On Solstice evening, Mark and I went out to Finley Wildlife Refuge for a dinner picnic and our traditional cross quarter day hike. We took all of our local, seasonal food—rhubarb cake, frittata with eggs and mustard greens from the back yard, salad from Sunbow—to eat on the bench overlooking a pond full of ducks, with swallows swooping overhead in a sky that had, just that day, turned summer blue. We were the only people there. After we finished, we walked the Mill Hill loop, singing out to the blooming oocow and checker mallows, slipping through trail mud, rejoicing in the soft warm evening air. As we turned the corner away from the marsh, two young owls moved off the trail, but stayed close, watching us watch them for five minutes before we moved on. We need to do this more often, we thought, climbing into the Ark for the ride home.

                I’ve spent the week, after we finished up some scope and sequence planning in record time (projected time 12 hours, time taken five—and we were not as efficient as we could be), bringing the gardens into summer order, weeding, trimming, mulching. Yesterday, I turned on irrigation at school and at home and nothing blew up anywhere.  The vines are all growing a couple of inches a day. The pea vines are loaded; the favas are bending over and breaking. The rain brought on a lot of vegetation which is now bearing fruit.

                All of the outdoor chairs are out. Books, shoes, and empty water glasses are scattered everywhere. The cat has scoped out all of her dappled shade spots and moves from one to the next on a predictable schedule. The rabbit has dug a cool burrow under the bleeding heart—the chickens are hanging out in the tangle of blackberries in the far back of the yard. The heat we were dreaming of, just a week ago, has arrived. Summer.