Trash day. This week, recycling. It is supposed to get hot, though yesterday the prediction overshot the day’s actual high of 77. Just in case, I changed the bedding yesterday in preparation: just sheets and a thin cotton blanket. I remember visiting Boston in the summer and lying perfectly still under just the sheet so as not to generate any excess heat. Mum must have advised me on this, because I would have been too young to reason it out for myself. I would slide my hand under the pillow to find a cool spot, would try to conserve the experience, only allowing myself infrequent dips into the cool. Sometime in the night I would turn the pillow over for a moment of relief. The room smelled like brick and plaster and the pink tea roses from Mr. Nick’s. After so many cold summers in Oysterville, the heat here is surprising and marvelous. It seems as if it must be a fluke, but last summer was hot, too, and no one else seems amazed. I love it. But the lawns will need to be mown soon again and that will be miserable. I’ve started watering in the evenings even though I know it is wasteful. June is in the driveway awaiting a shipment of seam compound from Jamestown Distributers. Today I’ll put the fourth coat of varnish on the new tiller—halfway there. We might be ready to launch in a week. Sailing before long. Work in the yard consists mostly of pulling weeds: ivy, blackberries, thistle. The thistle is terrible because of hay fever, but not hard. Ivy is the most gratifying. I love to see the shapes of the trees emerge, and the dappled sunlight loosed on the yard in the evening. But, really, it is the least urgent and I only do it to give myself relief from the harder work of blackberries…and writing.
