Last night T and I ate dinner at Chaval. We took an Uber there and afterward strolled home through the summer night--about a two-mile walk through the West End, down the hill into Bayside, along Deering Oaks Park, then over the highway into the Deering neighborhoods: first, Oakdale and across Woodfords Corner and finally into our own Deering Center hamlet. I like the names of the neighborhoods. I like the way the houses change and the trees change and the traffic changes. The hour was dusk and the sidewalks were busy downtown, filled with summer dresses and strollers and people buying frozen pizzas at the gas station and people putting out their trash for tomorrow and overtired toddlers crying hysterically; then thinning out as we radiated away from the city center, so that by the time we'd almost reached home only the dogs and the dog walkers were idling with us.

It was a warm night, a good night, summer in her glory, and we wore our summer finery, and the construction cranes and the ancient oak trees reached their arms into the sky, and the triple-decker apartment buildings looked like a child's Lego village, and dogs on their dog walks did not want to go home but tugged obstinately at their leashes and flumped down hard on the sidewalks.

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Today will be a little less hot, I think, but with thunderstorms and humidity, so I may still end up with the air conditioner on. For the moment, however, the windows are open and the machine is silenced. You must think it's funny how much time I've given over to A/C discussion this week, but it's a novelty to me: a significant physical relief (so much easier to concentrate on work, such a good sleep I had last night) but also a separation from the world, which I dislike. I think I had not realized how much I love summer as an encroachment into house-space . . . open windows, birdsong, children's quarrels, the slams of car doors, the barking of dogs, the spray of hoses, the kick of a soccer ball: these are the sounds of Deering Center, so different from and similar to the sounds of Harmony . . . wind in the firs, bleating goats, chainsaws, log trucks, the cry of a barred owl, the squeak of a fox, the shriek of a power drill, the quarrels of my own children, the barking of my own dog . . . Winter draws us into our private circle. Summer opens us into the communal one.