After a pleasant open-window weekend, this week's temps are supposed to be increasingly unbearable, so I guess the air machine will resume its clatter today. But for the moment the morning is cool. Outside, crows screech in the maples. Upstairs, T closes a drawer, yawns, murmurs to the cat. Early sunlight spatters the garden.

The days stretch ahead, torrid and bright--a week of ice tea and chicken salad and cold melon, of blazing forays into the herb patch, of wet glass rings on the tables and bare feet on cool tile.

When I was a child in such weather, I would loll on the farmhouse porch swing, swilling orange soda and reading stories of prairie blizzards.

Now the crows have stopped their argument, and I need to stop this wasteful writing and get on with my work day . . . laundry, bed making, sink scouring, dish washing, editing . . . plain song, plain air, arrow of my days.