Yesterday I mowed an enormous amount of lawn before 8 a.m. Today I get the mowing day off: just bread baking and laundry washing and boy driving and uranium-book editing. [Did you know that in the 1950s in the Colorado Plateau you could enter a Miss Atomic Energy pageant? Afterwards you could eat at the Uranium Cafe.]

This morning the corn is nine feet tall and the sunflowers are blooming riotously. I am thinking about poems and the ocean and the plunging hawk that almost bashed in the windshield of my new car. I am coaxing myself not to be cranky with my son, who did various aggravating 16-year-old boy things yesterday. Let bygones be bygones, I tell myself [but he'd better get that summer math packet finished and remember to charge his phone so that his mother doesn't have to spend 5 hours waiting for him and drive 80 miles out of her way].

On the bright side, I've just discovered that my sister is planning a 50th birthday party for me in October. And where will she be holding this party? In Franconia! A nine-person weekend at the Kinsman, beer at Schilling's, and finally a chance to show my boys Robert Frost's front porch. Also, finally a chance to hike at the Notch, which I've never done because I'm always working when I'm in the White Mountains. It will be lovely.