I slept until almost 7 this morning--a rare event. It's peculiar to wake up in full daylight. I'm usually a priestess of grey morning: drinking coffee in half-light, watching the streetlights blink off. Also dealing with the results of the cat's dawn hunt. Ugh. Yesterday he brought home a rat. Not a NYC subway leviathan, but definitely a rat. I've seen no signs of rat infestation in my yard; there's no food trash in the compost; I don't have outside garbage cans. But Ruckus is an enthusiastic rodent killer, and someone in the neighborhood seems to require his services.

Today will be another hot day, with thunderstorms rolling in in the afternoon. Strange to say, after so many months of wet, but we could use the rain. I've had to water every evening this week. I picked our first tiny green beans yesterday, and steamed them to serve in a farro and yogurt salad, along with peas, garlic chives, diced kohlrabi, and dill. We ate them with fresh summer rolls, filled with nasturtium flowers, big handfuls of herbs and lettuce, and bits of rice vermicelli, and dipped in tamari and fish sauce. It was a lovely garden meal.

I am still reading Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, and am now interspersing it with the Lewis and Clark journals. I haven't done much with the new poem drafts I scrawled into life at the Frost Place, but maybe I will be able to spend some time with them this weekend. Mostly I've been focused on pounding out chapters in my current editing project, which is a long and complicated historical novel and takes up a lot of my head space.

For now it is a pleasure to sit here idly in a summer nightgown, morning coolness washing through the wide-open windows, sunlight glancing off slate paths and the sunflower leaves. Yellow lilies beam in the side garden; the first black-eyed Susans are opening, and the dahlia buds are fat and glossy. Tiny purple flowers float over the bean patch. The tomato plants are six feet high and still growing. Only the peas are getting weary.