I spent Saturday correcting Chestnut Ridge proofs, reading about the Wars of the Roses, freezing beans, freezing sweet peppers, freezing kale, and, best of all, stringing up dozens of hot peppers for drying. The little garden continues to amaze me: I planted one hot pepper plant last spring, and yesterday I harvested about half of its crop. Now swags of little green peppers are looped comically above the kitchen window, looking exactly like those fake hot pepper lights people drape around Mexican restaurants. Later today I'm going to make a giant wonderful salsa with fresh hot peppers, fresh yellow and red tomatoes, lots of homegrown garlic, and a dishpan full of cilantro. Then I'm going to marinate beef for fajitas, and heat up the corn tortillas my older son sent us from the tortilla factory in his Chicago neighborhood, and we will have a glorious late summer meal. Eventually I'll probably pickle and can the rest of the hot pepper crop. Pickled peppers are wonderful in winter potato salads.

My back feels better but it's still stiff, so I woke up at 3 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep, and of course my brain was fretting about all sorts of ridiculous things that aren't worth fretting over, and then the cat jumped on me and made me get up, so that accounts for why I'm writing to you at 5:30 on a Sunday morning.

But since I'm awake anyway, I might as well read and write, and now that you're awake too, you might like to see my favorite passage (so far) from Desmond Seward's The Wars of the Roses:

The legal system began to break down [in the mid-1400s]. Frequently judge and jury were intimidated by archers lounging menacingly at the back of a courtroom.