We said goodbye to our sweet Maureen on Friday and so it seems fitting to say goodbye to summer too. These things are always awful but also a tiny bit of wonderful in that you get almost all your people in one room and there are lots of hugs and laughs along with the tears. Just so you know, if I know you personally and you have a funeral for a loved one, I will stock the family room at the wake with some cookies, or I will bring them to the funeral lunch. I did not do that this time, and not to shame the Lutherans but they only had store bought cookies and if ever a time calls for a homemade cookie, it’s a funeral. Things were very hectic leading up to it and I ran out of time. I will make up for it by feeding my cousins this week and there will be homemade brownies. I haven’t decided which kind. I do a pretty fab cheesecake brownie but I have a secret love of a brownie with chocolate frosting. If you grew up here, you are probably familiar with O’Rears and their brownies. They were of the dense, fudgy sort and frosted with a light cocoa icing. They were slightly chilled, probably to keep the icing from melting, and they were amazing. My family doesn’t have the same nostalgia for them so I don’t make them often, but I bet my cousins will remember.

So here is Sylvia Plath saying goodbye to summer:

August rain: the best of the summer gone,

and the new fall not yet born.

The odd uneven time.

It is an odd time. I’m sad to see summer go but also maybe not as much as I thought as the mosquitoes have become monstrous and I secretly like that it’s getting dark a little earlier so I’m less tempted to wander around outside until 9:30 at night. It’s easier to get to bed at the proper hour in the fall and winter.

I do love Sylvia Plath and I loved The Bell Jar but I don’t quote her all that often because she killed herself maybe not entirely over her total drip of a husband Ted Hughes—but I’m sure he was a major factor. I know I should have more sympathy for Sylvia but for heaven’s sake don’t stick your head in an oven over some jerk! We won’t even get into him destroying one of her journals and the general mishandling of her papers. I will point out though, that the woman he left Sylvia for also died by suicide 6 years later—also with carbon monoxide. Please don’t kill yourself. If he’s that awful that you want to stick your head in the oven, then just dope him up and stick his head in the oven instead. That’s a joke. Don’t do that. Anyway I love Sylvia but I’m also always a little bit mad at Sylvia because though she was careful to ensure her children’s physical safety from the carbon monoxide, I wish she had been able to grasp the importance of her staying for their emotional safety.

Well. that took a dark turn. This is why I mostly avoid Sylvia.

Let’s try again with Kate Bowler who never evokes images of heads in ovens:

Before the Guests

In the end it's who we loved-
how we'd sit out on the patio after it had rained,
telling the same stories about the family dog.
How, when invited over for a campfire, a round of cards,
a late-night summer swim, we'd pile in the car,
show up empty-handed to a house lit up
by familiar conversation. Yes, you can
build whole kingdoms of picture-perfect
laundry rooms and remodeled kitchen walls,
but when the light comes from every direction,
ready to carry you to the great unknown,
there is only one thing I'll care to remember:
August nights, September mornings,
entire seasons spent loving you.

In the end, it’s who we loved.

Farewell August and farewell Maureen.

I saw a clip of Jason Ritter being interviewed on Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb about the sudden loss of his father, John Ritter. I always stop and listen when someone is talking about grief because we talk so little about it.

We have a funeral this week. As a society overall we are truly terrible at talking about grief and death, it’s always a relief to stumble across a frank discussion of it. I think it’s getting better. Anderson Cooper has a podcast devoted solely to the subject. I have a lot to say about it but I’m not going to say it right now because once again I am bumping up against bedtime so I have to pull the reins. I’ll let Jason Ritter’s quote explain.

Hoda Kotb asked him how he got through the sudden loss of his father and he said this amazing thing. He said after the initial shock:

“The first beautiful thing that I remember is that around that period of time I have never seen more beautiful sunsets in my life. It was just this strange thing where maybe I wasn’t looking for them, whatever it was, the sunsets were so beautiful that it felt like when someone passes they get to have a paintbrush for a couple months and paint a couple sunsets. When you are carved out in that way, when something happens that’s so painful that your well of understanding of life is forced to go deeper like that, your capacity for all emotions grows.”

I don’t know if that’s true about the sunsets, but it’s a lovely thought, and I have seen nonstop amazing sunsets this week. I love the idea that Maureen is up there painting. I do think that death and grief change the space you’re in and everything looks and feels different.

My cousin and I were childhood playmates and she was always, always just fun and easy to be with. She was one of those truly miraculous people that had an innate kindness that ran deep into her soul. We had so, so much fun together. I remember we were crazy about the Bay City Rollers song Saturday Night. You can see Mike Myers singing along here in the movie So I married an Axe Murderer which you should definitely watch this weekend. We loved that song beyond all reason. I mean, it wasn’t like this was our discovery. Everybody loved that song in 1976. It still holds up. It’s a banger. We would play that song over and over and over again. It’s a miracle nobody murdered us. We did the same thing with Captain and Tenille’s Love will keep us together. I don’t know how her parents and siblings stood it.

We had a million sleepovers. We’d fall asleep talking to each other and start the conversation right back up when one of us opened their eyes in the morning. I don’t really remember what we were talking about. I just know we never got tired of talking to each other. She wasn’t an extrovert, so I think people didn’t always realize how funny she was until they really got to know her. She made me laugh, always. I thought of her when I watched this movie and I wonder if she ever saw it, as by the time it was released we were married and raising families and our sleepover days were over, which is another disadvantage to adulthood. She would have loved it.

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What is the purpose of ‘night mode’ on my phone if it can’t get a good pic of the moon. It is a half moon and the sky is quite clear, but here it just looks like the star of Bethlehem or maybe a UFO. You probably have the moon where you are too so you can go see the real thing.

I have recorded a video and mostly it’s about walking but also a little bit about death. It’s not terribly sad or anything so I don’t feel like it needs a trigger warning but if the thought makes you nervous you can skip it. I’ll never know. As much as I love to write it’s nice to occasionally just talk to you so I hope you enjoy it. Have a lovely weekend!

Aghdar really, really loves it. He liked the trailer we had just fine, but he never willingly climbed in. He saw this wagon and immediately hopped up in it and he’s so happy on the neighborhood walks now, but I know inevitably someone is going to comment saying he’s spoiled. It’s not just the neighborhood; that would also happen on any trail in any park. Look, I know I’m being a jerk here and people are just being friendly and want to say something funny but I find it super annoying.

I do this kind of mean thing if I’m in the wrong mood for it—like today—where a guy working on a house was watching when I was walking on the other side of the street and I knew when I came by on the way back, I just knew he was going to say it. I could tell he wanted to say it when we walked by the first time but he didn’t want to shout it across the street. So anyway, when I am feeling more irritable and less generous and somebody says, “Well he sure is spoiled!” I respond with, “Well, he’s only got three legs!” That probably seems mean because there’s nothing left but for that person to feel bad, but at least I’m not saying what I really want to say which is, “Do you say that to people in wheelchairs too? Do you say, ‘Man, you are so spoiled wheeling yourself around all the time and not having to walk anywhere!’

I would like to point out, I could’ve been much meaner, which should probably be carved on my tombstone. It can take the place of my first tombstone choice which is—See? I told you I was sick!

So I made that guy feel a little bit bad, but then I felt a little bit bad too so it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped. I know I’m an introverted weirdo but often when I’m walking I’m thinking and not really expecting interaction so I don’t always respond gracefully. One thing I hadn’t thought about when adopting a three legged dog is how much attention he would draw from people. People also like to say, “Look at him go! He’s just like a regular dog!” No. No he is not. He is a stone cold weirdo as dogs go and nothing about him is regular. The missing front leg is the least weird thing about him. That’s why he’s such a good dog for me.

I was telling Henry how much I hate when people say someone is spoiled, be it child or dog, and he thinks I’m being too sensitive and taking it too literally. He thinks people are saying it in a way that means, look how loved and pampered your dog is, well fine but then say that. I prefer people to speak with preciseness that reflects their intent. I am sure Henry is right but also I’m right too because the word spoiled inherently has a negative connotation. If you’re talking about food, it is never, ever a good thing, so how can it be a positive thing for a person? I heard it a lot in my childhood and I think people used to say it more back then and it was sort of an insult if not directly to the child then certainly to the parents. The general definition of spoiled when I was growing up was the kid that got anything they wanted, or the kid that had a lot of stuff, which of course we all know does not mean the child is well loved.

In the strict definition of it, I was spoiled. I generally got the stuff I asked for—like the Schwinn ten speed, which I left lying in the yard unlocked so it was stolen. So I got another one, at least another one, maybe another two. There was a lot of bike thievery in those days and I was often too distracted but to be fair, I should be able to leave my bike by the back door so instead of blaming me let’s focus on the delinquents that kept stealing my bike. To kids who spent many summer days detassling corn in the mud and the heat, or gave up their summers babysitting all day long every day just to get a new bike, I’m sure it was infuriating to watch me keep showing up with a new bike. Sorry, not sorry. Yes I know detassling was awful. I had cousins that did the whole season—and most people didn’t make it the whole season—and they were doing it to buy their school clothes. I thought it was crazy for them to have to buy their own clothes, and of course I did not understand that there was no other option for them.

When I needed money for fun I just asked and it was given with no discussion or question or talk of chores. I didn’t have an allowance; this was an on demand situation. If you’re a parent you probably find this horrifying but as a kid it was great! Except, part of the reason my parents were so indulgent with money and things is because they were overwhelmed and exhausted by one crisis after another and I was the good and mature for her age daughter who only wanted money and stuff and didn’t require a lot of emotional investment or attention that they didn’t have the bandwidth to give. It really wasn’t a great system for any of us but when life seems frightening and unstable, nobody can really think about the future.

I know people are not going to stop saying my dog is spoiled and I need to just smile and say that yes, he sure is. What I would like to say is, yes, he is, because when he lived in Azerbaijan he was a street dog subsisting on scraps and sleeping where he could out in the heat and the cold. He’s covered in scars from fights and abuse. He was found by the side of the road with a badly broken leg, too far gone to be saved so it was amputated. This is common in Azerbaijan where they don’t do much in the way of spaying and neutering pets, so there is an overpopulation problem that is sometimes handled in ways so distressing I won’t tell you because then you won’t sleep. I used to follow the shelter on social media and I had to stop because there are so many amputee dogs because they’re hit by cars and just left lying there suffering. Auggie has seriously jacked up teeth, some of which may have been broken when he was put in a crate and put on a plane for something like 15 hours to come here. He is older than his passport said, which we kind of figured since his birth year was whited out and written over. Older dogs have a harder time getting adopted, and I think they just wanted him to have a chance. We don’t mind.

I won’t say any of that though because it’s just going to make someone feel bad and it probably made you feel bad but look, his story has a very happy ending where he is well loved and cared for. He is not spoiled, I don’t think—at least he doesn’t smell that way.

I’m not in my usual state of August melancholy I think because I’ve been too busy to ponder it. Maybe my plan to be outside more makes the transition easier because it’s kind of awful out there. It’s swampy and buggy. We went for a walk last night and everything is so lush and green and the flowers are incredible and it is so humid you may as well be walking under water. Even a leisurely after dinner stroll requires a shower because you can’t walk more than five feet without sweating through your shirt. It doesn’t seem quite so sad that summer is ending if it also means the pester-y little gnats that try to fly into my eyeballs while gardening will also be ending.

I’ll leave you with a Mary Oliver poem on this Sunday night.

Work, Sometimes.

I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words

falling off my tongue. The robins had been a long time singing, and now it

was beginning to rain. What are we sure of? Happiness isn’t a town on a map, or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around

with a poem. Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard

were full of lively fragrance. You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn’t it wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a

moment! As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was

the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.

I strolled down the hill to get a better view and then I was treated to a pair of Cooper’s Hawks calling to each other.

Then I went home and put my jammies on and we are always in bed by 10 so we have some time to read. I have started re-reading Lake Woebegon Days by Garrison Keillor because it’s a funny book but also very soothing which don’t we all need right now? I re-read things when I feel like my brain is on overload, which is to say almost all the time. I have several stacks of books on my nightstand, probably more than thirty, and I’ve read them all. They are my good and trusted friends that will not raise my blood pressure as I’m falling asleep. I have weird enough dreams without adding any Stephen King into the mix.

I do the same thing with tv shows, though some of the old ones can be hard to watch because oof, the way they talked to and about women is pretty rough. I’m old enough now that I can re-watch an old show and it doesn’t have to go all the way back to the seventies which can be pretty disturbing. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the seventies and the tv shows but it really takes me out of it when the men are so skeevy. Will and Grace is far enough back in time to soothe the soul and everyone behaves reasonably well.

I heard recently there’s a reboot of Little House on the Prairie. Fun fact—I always hated that show. I know this is a wildly unpopular opinion. Look, I liked some of it okay, but I always felt Michael Landon was a jerk. I don’t know why. It started with Bonanza. Everyone loved little Joe but I just thought he was a weirdo creep. I much preferred Hoss. Hoss was just a big nice guy with a good heart. Little Joe was a lunatic who was always doing dumb stuff like falling in love with a crazy woman who thinks she’s a werewolf.

I didn’t like him any better as Pa Ingalls. I never read the books and they have faced some criticism recently as people have pointed out that Laura’s dad was kind of an a-hole for dragging his family around with no real plan and no real competency at wilderness life. Still, I know they were a beloved part of many childhoods. If you are one of those people may I suggest you read Harriet the Spy? It’s maybe my favorite book of all time and there are adventures but no threat of starvation.

I hear my current husband dozing in the other room so I better go wake him up or we’ll miss reading time. Nighty night!

It was a crazy busy week around here and we are T-I-R-E-D. I am hoping I make wise decisions about my precious weekend time—a nice balance of rest and accomplishment—or if I make bad decisions I just hope they skew toward the fun kind and not that I accidentally spent the entire weekend cleaning the basement kind. Cleaning the basement should be done only during lousy weather. Now is the time to be outside.

One thing I do want to accomplish this weekend is to assemble Auggie/Patrick’s new stroller wagon. You might be thinking that you wouldn’t put your grandchild in the same wagon you use for your dog but look I’m not rich and I don’t have endless wagon money. Also, I feel confident Patrick would be cool with it. He’s a very cool kid and so far seems very fiscally responsible so I don’t think he’d want me to buy two stroller wagons.

I already bought the dog stroller below, which was expensive and has been somewhat useful but the main intent was that I could toss it in the car and take Auggie to various parks, and that has not been as easy as I’d hoped. I can collapse it, but I can’t pop it back up. You need the strength of Dan or Hercules to do that, and neither of them are available during the week. The stroller wagon is supposed to be easily collapsed just like a regular stroller and we are going to be able to hit all our favorite parks again soon and I am happy.

But tonight, I already went on a very muggy after dinner stroll and came back with some cucumbers from Gloria’s glorious garden and now it’s time to relax my brain by watching something silly. I talked about summer movies I liked last summer but some of you are new here, so here is my short list of summer faves. I’m not linking these because they’re all streaming at different places and you can find them if you want to.

Creature from the Black Lagoon If you want to see a strong woman in STEM fighting the patriarchy and a monster, this is the movie.

Anaconda(1997) I’m not reviewing these but guys, listen, if you have never watched this what are you even doing? Jon Voight. Owen Wilson. Danny Trejo. Jennifer Lopez. Ice Cube. Giant snake. Really. It’s the worst in the best possible way.

Anaconda(2025) Jack Black and Paul Rudd remade the original. Also great.

Wet Hot American Summer If you’re a comedy nerd you already know this one and you know everyone in it. A spoof of summer camp movies It is completely ridiculous and I love it, but you have to have a certain suspension of disbelief to enjoy it fully.

What about Bob? Lake Winnipesaukee. The lake you see in the movie is actually a lake in Virginia with a less interesting name but it’s more fun to just accept the premise of the lake house in New Hampshire.

The Birdcage Anything set in Miami feels like summer

Something about Mary see above

This is how I feel about the giant swallowtail.

I came across this quote from Mary Oliver—another Mary I adore. I have had the intention all summer to start my day by reading Mary Oliver but mostly I have just moved the book around my house. At least it’s off the shelf.

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and upraising, and gave it neither power nor time.”

Geez, Mary. I’m trying! Someone has to water the flowers and fill the bird feeders and hand out popsicles to the wonderful wild children roaming the neighborhood. We can’t all be sitting in the forest all the time, though that life would also suit me well. Or probably I would just get Lyme disease. I wonder if Mary Oliver ever had it.

I do love these long summer evenings in the front yard getting to visit with dogs and babies and whoever wanders by. To be clear, the dogs and babies are with their families. There are no unattended babies wandering my neighborhood.

It has been a busy work-y sort of week but a week of summer delights. These are mostly food related. I drove out to the good corn wagon in a fit of optimism and there was actually some left. I had ordered some green tomatoes from Market Wagon which is an online farmer’s market here in Indiana. So we had fried green tomatoes and ribs and sweet corn and watermelon because it is July and sweet corn is fleeting.

I made Japanese iced coffee this morning because my cold brew has been disappointing me lately in a way I can’t quite name. I prefer cold brew because it’s much lower acid and doesn’t hurt my stomach. I make it myself with a mix of beans so it’s about half caffeinated, which is 50 percent more caffeine than I should have. I try to be mindful of it, mostly because too much caffeine makes me cry. I’m not kidding. I can’t explain it. I may have said this before but I would equate it to an unattended three year old getting into the cake at a birthday party and maybe eating half that cake before anyone noticed, and then that kid is going to absolutely lose her mind for a bit—and that kid is me on caffeine. However, I am happy and productive for a little bit before I start crying.

Okay anyway. Japanese-Style Iced Coffee seems like nonsense because it’s really just doing a pour over but instead of into an empty carafe it’s pouring over ice. You guys, I am not kidding when I say this is amazing! It has a wonderful smooth and clear flavor. It may seem a bit fussy if you’re not one for weighing your ingredients and it may seem like a bother but it’s totally worth it.

Earlier this week we had BLT’s with tomatoes from the farmer’s market. The lettuce was from Market Wagon—so it’s not the diarrhea kind.

Tomorrow is the last day of July which usually triggers my micro-seasonal affective disorder. Despite several people I love deeply having been born in August, it’s one of my least favorite months. When school started after Labor Day back in the 1900’s, I didn’t mind August. Now school starts much earlier—next week for some of my neighbor buddies. They are excited to go back and I’m glad they feel that way about it. I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow, but right now it seems okay. Maybe I get to skip the end of summer funk this year, or maybe I’m just happy because of that coffee, or because of Mary. It’s definitely Mary.

This is my actual face, and these are my actual words, and anything you read here will always be from my actual brain and not AI. It’s really annoying that it’s now necessary for me to say that.

I don’t write with AI. I do use em dashes—lots of them. See what I did there? I’ve been using them in my writing my whole life. Maybe that will make the screener think this is AI. I hope not, because it really, really isn’t.

Look—I am sure AI is going to have many wondrous uses but it has been a constant irritant that is forced on me at every turn, so I’m allowed to hate it. Yes, if AI finds my bone cancer I will be very grateful, but in the meantime, I really wish it would get out of my way.

I don’t want this to turn into an anti AI rant. There was an article in the Sunday New York Times I Got Slopped. Someone used AI to write my biography by Kashmir Hill. It’s not behind a paywall. It’s a perfect articulation of my concerns.

Just know that I am never using AI to write. Yes, I wish I had more time to write more long form pieces and to explore deeper topics, but what I want is to actually do the thing. I can’t imagine how it would possibly feel good or satisfying to have AI do it for me. That’s like going to the pool and paying someone to swim for you. The work, the thought, the emotion is what makes the task worth doing.

“A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make an absolute truth.” Ernest Hemingway

I took a break from working today to clean my bird feeders and it was very hot and muggy before the storms rolled in so I was really sweating. That’s one of the nice things about July heat. You really feel like you’re getting a work out when all you’re really doing is just puttering around. If I sweat through my bra I’m counting it. I haven’t been outside on a lot of the hotter days because work was busy or the air quality was awful, but I am determined to let these humid, buggy waning days of summer just soak into my bones. I confess though, that I had a few moments out there today when I had thoughts of fall, after the first frost, when all the gd bugs would be dead. Look, I love bugs. I know insects are critical to our survival and I try to catch the spiders in the house in a cup and put them outside. Sure, about half the time I accidentally cut their legs off but my intentions are good. Still, when the biting fly bit me on the back of the leg—why? why are these things in my yard? I thought they were supposed to live in Canada!—and when the gnats kept trying to fly straight into my eyeballs, and when the ants that had created a nursery in my bird feeder started running up my arm carrying the eggs in a total panic I did think, well, you’ll all be dead soon. I tried not to kill the ants and hopefully they salvaged enough of the eggs to set up a new home but I also hope it’s not in my ear.

The point is that I know we need all these little creatures and we have a symbiotic relationship whether we realize it or not, so I try to be generous sharing my space—but I live here too, guys. Stop biting me. But welcoming the bugs sometimes gets you this….

Hellooooo, gorgeous!

But I did go see some wildflowers.

There were lots of happy bees and butterflies.

Here is the Spotify playlist I promised for this summer. The first nine songs are just newer grooves that I love and the rest are straight nostalgia from long ago when summer was just fun all the time and we were running around sunburnt and happy. I do want to explain the name of the playlist. It’s a quote from the movie Biloxi Blues written by Neal Simon and starring Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken. Matthew plays a New Yorker drafted into the army towards the end of World War Two. He’s marching in the swampy misery of summer in Mississippi and he says, “Man it's hot. It's like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn't take this kind of hot.It never got this hot in Brooklyn.” We say, “It’s like Africa hot,” any time it’s hot out. Nobody ever knows what we’re talking about. Watch the movie and then you can say it too.

Here is how you can tell…are you still eating lettuce? Well if you are, God bless. I wish you the best of luck. I am not eating lettuce in restaurants but I will eat locally grown or hydroponically grown greens. Honestly this isn’t a big change for me because restaurant lettuce is risky.

I have always loved the following sentence from A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson and I think it’s relevant here. I’m not wishing it on you. I’m just saying it’s a possibility given your optimism. In this quote he is talking about the risk of multiple bears invading his camp site on the Appalachian trail. He was reading a book on bear attacks in preparation and had read many stories of one bear attacking and had not considered that more than one might show up. Now, a parasite is not a bear, so it’s not going to kill you, but it will be rough.

“Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay it would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

Enjoy your salad and enjoy blowing your sphincter out like a party favor!

JK. I hope that doesn’t happen to you, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m traveling again tomorrow but I’m hoping to do a little writing from the road so maybe I’ll have that summer playlist I promised. Or maybe I’ll just be listening to Bonanas for Bonanza because I am in deep need of some silliness and nonsense. I hope you have a restful weekend. I hope I do too.

You’re probably surprised to hear that I did not watch the UFC fight, but I was happy about the outcome. Here is why: I really hate that sport but I do like Max Holloway. We watched the fights frequently when Henry’s friend lived here—me usually peeking through my fingers— and I could never get used to watching a guy’s head snap back on his brain stem and then he’d crumple into an unconscious heap while everyone was cheering for the guy that won. I never liked fighting, and there was a fair amount of it that I witnessed in my childhood. We lived across the street from Edgelea pool and it was a popular place to arrange fights after the pool closed. You could not get away with that nonsense if the pool was open because the man who ran the pool, Ralph, would not have it. Ralph was great. He wasn’t fun or funny or engaging with the kids. He took his job very seriously, but as someone who appreciates order I was glad he was there making everyone follow the rules. Anyway, if I saw a fight happening I never ran over and watched. I ran in the house. I could not bear it. So I don’t like UFC at all but I did see one fight I liked because Max Holloway, who is a small guy, a featherweight, was fighting this big muscle-y guy and I always root for the little guy, who I assume is the underdog though maybe that’s not the case with Max. Anyway, he doesn’t look like he belongs in the ring with these lunatics, and he was fighting and I was thinking, get out of there little buddy because you’re going to get killed, and then whap! He kicked that big piece of meat right in the jaw with his foot—or maybe his shin bone, and the guy dropped to the canvas and that was it. It was like seeing a tiny six year old beat up a mean teenage bully. It was very satisfying.

Since then, I have paid no attention at all and since Jacob bought a house Henry goes there to watch the fights. Henry asked me if I was going to watch the fights this weekend and I laughed because of course not, but then he said that he thought I might want to watch this one because Max Holloway was fighting Connor McGregor—who is a big dirtbag rapist and just the worst sort of human. I was worried for Max, but I didn’t watch. It turns out Max won in under two minutes and I was very happy to hear that.

The video below is the story of my Friday night mud fest.

It was a swell weekend even with the mud.

So I did an unusual thing this morning and got up early so I could wander downtown to one of my fave coffee shops. I know other adults do this sort of thing all the time, but I want the most sleep possible so I am almost never going to get coffee before work. I do love a humid summer morning where it’s not yet hot but you can feel it coming, so it was nice to be out and about.

You can walk outside in the least clothes you’ll wear all year and feel it’s appropriate and comfortable. The sky was brilliant azure shade that looks like the heart of summer to me. And oh, our downtown is so charming.

This was before I headed downtown. The sky is always softer in the morning and then gets brighter as it gets warmer and then gets hazy when it’s hot. When people say they don’t know what they’ll do with themselves when they retire I always think I could never tire of staring at the sky.

And this is on the way home. July corn.

And this is our swell downtown. Look at the detail on these buildings! I’m not saying it’s Paris, but it is beautiful.

Then I went back and did my job that was very jobby this week and when that wrapped up I was going to water the flowers and a perfect summer storm popped up to do it for me.

I was on the porch enjoying the good, soaking rain, but then it started to become a little more rain…

And then it was an alarming amount of rain…

We have a drainage issue in the side yard and we’ve never quite figured out the best solution. Our handyman suggested a French drain, which I thought sounded lovely. My aunt has a French drain in her courtyard and it’s so pretty when it rains. It’s becomes a lovely little brook that you can enjoy so it’s like a pop up water feature that requires no maintenance. But this is not what Frank meant when he said French drain. Apparently in Indiana our version of a French drain is a pvc pipe with a bunch of holes that you bury in the ground and it’s supposed to divert water. I asked, won’t it just get clogged with dirt? No. We put something sort of like panty hose over it, but also yes, eventually it will probably get clogged with dirt. Well that’s the dumbest plan I ever heard then. Sorry, Frank.

So Henry and Dan and I have been talking about options. I said maybe we just get a bunch of dirt and build big hills around the window wells. Would that look crazy? Yes, but geez, when do I get to give up on making it look nice out there and just get practical. I could grow great tomatoes in my front yard but that would look weird so I don’t do it. My backyard has a black walnut so I can’t grow any veggies back there.

Keep in mind we can go years without water in the basement but when we get a torrential rain and the ground is already saturated it sluices into the window wells. It has happened maybe 7 times in the 27 years we’ve lived here so it was never at the top of the list for problems to solve. It was a nuisance, but it’s a concrete basement. I have never intended to put carpet down there because a friend of mine had to rip carpet out of her flooded basement three times, and then she moved and bought a house with two sump pits and no water issues, and she had to rip that carpet out too. It’s a drag to get water in our basement but it’s not really ruining anything.

My decision to pay attention to the beautiful July day started really well and it really did lift my mood and release some stress. It ended with a lot of mud and a trench and also maybe now we have no internet because of something I did, but I will tell you about that tomorrow in a video. It was still a good day.

These lovely flowers were at the coffee shop.

Storms came through overnight and broke that crazy heat we had, It was such a beautiful blue sky morning.

The bald cypress had a million little rain droplets. Beautiful.

I bought a chicken at the butcher shop yesterday and broke it down so we could make Buttermilk Brined Southern Fried Chicken from Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab--Better Home Cooking Through Science cookbook. It is a weighty thing, this cookbook, but you will understand every step of a recipe and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Since the heat had let up we decided to cook some holiday favorites—like this sour cherry slab pie. This was from last summer. The one I’m making tonight won’t have those festive stars—and I’ll tell you why.

Because if you put a full crust on, you can add that powdered sugar glaze drizzled over it. It’s like a toaster strudel if toaster strudel was made with real cherries and butter.

I sat on the porch and painted my toenails an aqua color to match my favorite Schwinn ten speed bike from 1976. Remember how much fun the bicentennial was? Our 250th is decidedly more subdued, as it should be, because we are like the 18 year old that left home and maybe it’s not going so well, and maybe we needed a gap year or a year of living at home and some community college because the launch has gotten very bumpy. We may have to move home and try again in a couple years. Sometimes you have to sober up and get your shit together and try again.

I have a million ideas bouncing around my head but I’m too tired to do any of them justice so here’s some nonsense. I was scrolling through my July pics over the years so I could find something that would make a nice post, but holy crap! July has been a decidedly mixed bag over the years and it’s amazing to scroll through and see—oh, that was a fun wedding—oh, that was when I was in the ER for an allergic reaction to the antibiotics —oh, remember how beautiful Maine was? Remember when my picc line fell out? Like the rest of life, July was fantastic and awful.

I would like to just live quietly this July, either on my front porch, maybe my hammock, or in my delightfully air conditioned house. I don’t want anything bad to happen, but I also don’t want anything good to happen. I just want nothing to happen. I have such lovely memories of my childhood summer days and I know I’m not a child anymore but I do remember my mother just sitting in a lawn chair in the backyard and she seemed relaxed. I wonder how she did it. Valium, maybe? It was very popular in the 60’s and 70’s.

Maine.

There were lots of sunsets and clouds and flowers and family and the occasional beach or creek or river or pool.

I love a purple summer night.

There were a shocking number of nail polish pics. Apparently I have been trying to find the perfect summer color for at least five years.

The preposterous thing about all these nail polish pics is between cooking and cleaning and gardening and typing away, there is no way that manicure is lasting more than three days.

There was also this post from a local Facebook page. People do get a little nuts in the summer. Is it the heat? The long evenings? The fact that everyone is outside more so there’s more opportunities for conflict?

I don’t know who that guy is but I love him. Maybe he wants two cats! My drinking days are long past but I can immediately relate to anyone crying because they want the cat but also they are holding the cat. Same, dude, same.

I’m not kidding. I really am going to lay low this July. I’ve had very little porch time and I have a lot of projects I want to focus on, and also there’s a new season of 100 Foot Wave which is a documentary about big wave surfers in Portugal. I love documentaries about obsessive people.

I’ll be back again before the fourth. Stay fresh, cheese bags!

I still have not read this book, though I did check it out of the library twice. I wish I had more time to read deeper material like this but it requires one to be awake, and I only seem to find time to read right before bed. At bedtime, I am not interested in deep thinking. My mind is active enough at night so I need to be very careful what I consume. I stick to memoir with the occasional British mystery, trending towards humor but I like a good wilderness survival memoir and also books about people being attacked by bears, and also books about addiction and alcoholism, though I haven’t dipped my toe into that fetid pool in a while. This is all a long way of saying I cannot read philosophy at bedtime and hope to actually sleep well. The nice thing about the podcast is they’re synthesizing it for me in their discussion so basically it’s like I read it.

They were discussing jealousy. Kelly said she envies people that are naturally thin. Claire envies people the opportunities she thinks she’s missed and she said when she starts feeling it she takes it as a reminder to see what exactly is missing in her life. But Kate really struck me with her take, “I think I mostly get really jealous of control narratives because I crave it so much.” She envies people who talk about working out because she loves it but her own ongoing post cancer health issues often limit what she can do so it might be hard for her to listen to you rave about your favorite Peloton instructor.

What she’s talking about is people being very happy at their good fortune, whether it’s health or work or family, and so much of it isn’t really our own agency making it happen. A lot of it is luck, or fate if you will. Being a cancer survivor, she looks at life through a different lens. A potentially fatal illness, a major accident, a catastrophe, whether it’s you, or someone close to you, will always remind you how little control you have over anything at all. It changes you. And of course, we want people to feel joy when things are going well for them, but also maybe we want to pinch them a little bit.

Kate said, “But sometimes it just mostly makes me feel like an alien.” Of course, when you have had to unexpectedly face your possible end, you know something other people don’t. They can’t know it, and so you do feel like an alien because you are not seeing the world the same way at all. It’s like being the first kid in the class that knows Santa isn’t real. It’s not that you really want to ruin it for everyone, exactly, but it’s also mystifying that everyone can still be so clueless.

I think about control a lot. I see the misery it causes when people try to exert it over others—the parents who choose their child’s college major only to have them drop out with one class left to finish. I know two people that did that. You can push people in a certain direction for a bit but it never works long term, and then your son or daughter gets to rightly blame you when their life doesn’t turn out the way they wanted.

I have to fight the urge to try to control things, the narrative, the plan, the agenda. If you grew up with any instability then you probably do it too. It can be in the guise of being helpful or looking out for others but we’re probably honestly just annoying the bejesus out of them. For me, it’s usually fear based. And it almost never works or turns out well.

I remember when Henry was starting a new school and though he was fine, I was nervous on his behalf. They gave us a tour of the fourth grade classrooms, and I had noticed a teacher’s welcome decor that I thought was really fun so I asked if he could be in that class instead of the one he was assigned because I wanted him to have a fun teacher. She was fun. She was also disorganized and chaotic. She was okay, but the teacher he was originally assigned would’ve been a much better fit academically. Also she couldn’t pronounce the word hyperbole, and look I understand that’s not a word that’s coming up in regular conversation so no shame to you if you don’t know how to pronounce it either, but if you are teaching my kid about hyperbole, you should know how to say it.

So I don’t know if it’s the accrued wisdom of my years or I’m often just too tired to care about stuff but I find I’m able to let go of control in little ways—like my flowers. Please do not think I am claiming I have a perfectly manicured and planned garden—not at all—but I do like certain colors very much and I like the colors to all work together, so I did a bonkers thing this year and bought a flat of zinnias and none of them had bloomed, so I had no idea what I was going to get. It is so fun! I’ve really enjoyed watching them bloom so I can see what I got! Giving up just a nova skosh of control now and then does reap some benefits!

Look at this orange zinnia! Spectacular!

Fuchsia!

By the time I get back from my trip my daisies and black eyed Susans will be blooming and this will look smashing!

Speaking of giving up control, I’m traveling again tomorrow and getting on a plane is an amazing exercise in giving up control. I’m not too worried because I am staying on this continent and wherever I wind up I can always rent a car and drive myself home if needed.

Been traveling and am too tired to write much. Can’t even do complete sentences, but this guy. Dad. Grandpa. Love.

Isaac—amazing at being a dad.

In case you were thinking by dad looks somber here…

That’s just his face. Always has been.

I have a lot to say about my dad—about a whole book’s worth of stuff to say, but I don’t have time so I will just say this. He taught me to love reading, and cooking, and fishing, but the biggest gift he gave me was teaching me to love being outdoors, away from the things of man—which is a good line I stole from Joe vs. The Volcano—different Joe—my dad had nothing to do with that movie.

This guy. My Uncle Will. One of the greats. I could never thank him enough for letting my little ragamuffin feral self invade his home every summer.

We miss this guy. He loved being a grandpa.

I started to feel very sleepy. I have trained my brain to associate sleep with rain, which is probably going to make you nervous if we’re ever on a road trip together and I’m driving in the rain. That’s valid. You should be nervous.

I hate driving in heavy rain. I would much rather drive on icy roads or in snow, and it seems like every long roadtrip I’ve ever done has involved at least one downpour where I can barely see the taillights in front of me and it feels very dangerous to keep going but equally dangerous to stop. I was driving north into Michigan with my boys when they were younger. We were on our way to my brother’s wedding in Massachusetts and I decided we’d go up through Port Huron and across Canada. Summer is a terrible time for Dan to try to take off work, so I was the only driver in the van, and that was fine until I was being swamped in the pitch dark by semis blowing past me. I was so happy to finally see the Blue Water bridge which meant Sarnia was just on the other side and we had survived the first leg of the trip.

Then there was the crazy rain outside of Memphis when we drove to Houston, and the time I was driving at night around Harrisburg Pennsylvania and there was horrible rain and construction and closed exits and I ended up at a gas station across the street from what I think was a trap house. I can’t say for sure, because I didn’t go in, but I can say all the windows were knocked out and there was no light, but there was a steady stream of people were going in and out. I don’t know what they were doing. Maybe 45 close friends chipped in to buy a house to flip. If it hadn’t been so late I probably wouldn’t even have noticed but after three hours of white knuckle driving in the torrential rain, my adrenaline was already pumping. I’m rarely uncomfortable in unfamiliar surroundings but this place felt off and I was lost and exhausted and there was only very rudimentary GPS in those days and it could not guide you through construction detours. I looked around for a friendly face and I saw a guy wearing a lanyard with a name tag on it and I asked him how to get back to the interstate and he was very helpful, which now means that if you want to kidnap or murder me, just wear a name tag and I will fall for it. So he was super helpful and when I was getting in the van he said, “Just ignore the stop signs and keep going.” Oh. Okay.

Then there was that other storm on the way back from Houston when we drove on the Natchez Trace Parkway which was fun except it doesn’t really have lights and it just sort of dumps you out in the middle of nowhere outside Nashville. It was raining buckets and we could catch glimpses of the Hilton high up on a hill above the highway but couldn’t find the frontage road to access it. I believe I told this story before but it ends up with me bedraggled and dripping wet in an elevator with Barbara Mandrell asking me if I was in town for the awards. She was wearing a full length sequined gown, and I was wearing completely saturated shorts and a t shirt, so yes Barbara, obviously I’m in town for the awards. I’m still mad at her about that.