The Blaze of Summer

The key to enjoying the hot summer months is to get out early in the day. The bristling sunlight and the cool shadows make a delightful mix, summoning a spirit of exhilaration that seems almost heaven sent. We’ve had more than our share of rain this summer, but it’s been good for the plants, and there have been plenty of fresh, sparking days, too. Days of heart-rending beauty.

One morning Hilary and I drove south down West River Road with our bikes to Minnehaha Falls and took a trip up the creek to Lake Harriet. Bright, cool and spectacular. The trails were uncrowded, the gardens by the Longfellow House were stunning; and the pickleballers at Lake Nokomis—trim and athletic—were having a blast.

By the time we got back to the falls the Minnehaha Art Fair was in full swing. (Before setting out we’d seen the rows of square tents lined up under the trees like an Arabian bazaar, but had no idea what was going on.) The line at Sea Salt was already long, so we gave up on the dream of a calamari lunch and took the plunge down the first aisle.

It struck me almost immediately that the quality of the work was high, though many of the objects for sale inhabited that broad but vague realm between fine art and gift shop merchandise.

Halfway down the first row I was drawn to the linoleum block prints of Matt Otero.

Across the aisle, at a tent devoted exclusively to long, narrow bowls carved out of mid-sized pieces of birch with the bark left on, I was struck by the seeming incongruity of the sign: Erv Berglund – Fridley. Erv was standing right there, and he looked Scandinavian, as did the art, so I took a chance and said: “You look like someone who should live in Scandia or Lindstrom.”

Erv nodded and said, “I used to do some hunting out that way. I grew up in South Minneapolis. There was a Dane down the street, and another Swede on the next block.” My God. He had an accent!

We made our way down the aisles, past jewelers and silk-screeners, potters and weavers. I tried to convince one soap-maker to look into the possibility of linden soap. “Is that an essential oil?” she asked. How would I know? She looked it up in a book that was sitting on a table nearby. “Hmm. Yes, it is.”

During our stroll Hilary was on the lookout for the woman who made her purse. She loves that purse, but she needs a new one.

We have several friends who have made a good living selling things at events like these. But after two or three aisles everything starts to look slightly superfluous and vaguely meretricious. (I blame it on the heat.) Having failed to locate the food trucks (if there were any) we returned to our bikes and cycled the remaining quarter mile to our car, which was parked near the entrance to the lock and dam. A stunning morning, well spent.

A few days later we headed west early to the Landscape Arboretum and took a stroll around the grounds. The day lilies were singing, the herbs were fragrant, and the bedding plants were spectacular. Even the orangish shades were appealing in the long shadows of mid-morning. We cut behind the Snyder Building on our way back to the car and met up with a young man selling coffee on the terrace. Hilary commented on the book by the Buddhist monk Pema Chodron that was sitting on the counter of his cart. She’s a fan.

"I’ve read all of her books,” he said. “They’re pretty similar. But she’s helped me through some tough times.” I asked him what he did when he wasn’t baking in the summer sun on the Arboretum terrace selling coffee. “I’m a yoga instructor at LifeTime Fitness,” he said.

I couldn’t quite picture it. “You mean, like poses and mediation and stuff?”

“I think you’ve got the general idea,” he said, smiling good-naturedly.

A woman was watering plants with a sprayer hose a few feet away. As we passed her she said hi, and I said, “If it gets too hot, you can just spray yourself.”

“I do. I do,” she said. “I just spray up into the air and down it comes.”

“Would you spray me?” I said.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

So she shot a shower up into the air in my direction. That was refreshing. Unfortunately, as she brought the nozzle of the hose back down she inadvertently “let me have it” with a direct hit to the chest.

“Oh, I sprayed you too much,” she said with a sheepish giggle. “Well, don’t worry. You’ll be dry in half an hour!”

Though the afternoons have been almost unbearably hot, we hosted my cousin Rich and his wife Sarah for lunch on the deck one day at noon. 

And a few days ago we met some friends for a late afternoon performance at the Theodore Wirth Trailhead given by the Mixed Precipitation Opera Company. They were doing Mozart’s Idomeneo, an early “opera seria” that’s sometimes referred to as his first masterpiece, though it’s seldom performed.

Mercifully, the troupe had decided to move the performance into the cool and capacious confines of the Trailhead building itself, rather than out on the grass behind the building. And the show was an utter blast.

The group takes its opera seriously, in so far as the voices are strong and the singing heart-felt. But they ham up the drama as if it were a SNL skit. The orchestra has been replaced by a cabaret quartet consisting of cello, violin, accordion, and guitar. And by editing out two thirds of the material and adding a few pop tunes and jivey dances here and there, they succeed in keeping the audience amused—even those who might not like opera much. We loved it.

You can hear a snatch of the music here:

 

Bear Head Lake State Park: Home on the Range

We took a few days off recently and headed north to Bear Head Lake State Park, which sits deep in the woods on a large peninsula extending south into the largely undeveloped lake. By “woods” I mean the North Woods—a mix of pine, spruce, aspen, and hardwoods, hazelnut and dogwood, ferns and sarsaparilla, that was logged more than a century ago and is now robust again. Many of the white pines in the park were too small to be harvested back in1910; they’re majestic now. 

The remains of some of the largest open-pit mines in the Western Hemisphere are located nearby, but you see them only occasionally along the highway, vast depressions in the earth, often surrounded by mountains of slag and clothed in a veneer of scrubby vegetation. What you see more often are the towns that once supported the mines—Gilbert, Eveleth, Tower, Virginia, Biwabik, Aurora; the ore was largely depleted decades ago, and now most of them are struggling.

At this point I might note that my mother grew up in Virginia, and we visited her folks from time to time. Though I didn’t play hockey, we watched the annual high school hockey tournament together year after year with great interest. I’d heard the names Mountain Iron, Roseau, Baudette, and International Falls many times before I had the slightest idea where they were. (Check out Jim Hoey’s fine book, Puck Heaven, for more details.)

My mom and her two older siblings on Lake Vermilion

Later, my parents bought a slice of land on a cove in Black Bay, at the west end of Lake Vermilion, and we built a boxy plywood cabin there, making sure not to disturb the towering red pines growing nearby. In time, by imperceptible and almost Proustian degrees, the natural mystique of the Iron Range sunk in, and it was compounded later by the summers I spent canoeing in the BWCA.   

A few years ago Bear Head S.P. was voted the best state park in America as part of a promotional campaign sponsored by Coca-Cola. I don’t know why. It doesn’t even rank among the ten most popular parks in Minnesota (which highlights a troubling aspect of the democratic process more generally: people who know absolutely nothing about the issues often do the most voting).

Yet Bear Head SP does have an attractive array of features. First and foremost, it’s a boater’s park. It’s on a large lake, but the shoreline along the campground area is riddled with inlets that would appeal to visitors interested in kayaking, canoeing, and—yes— paddleboarding. 

If you take the path through the woods along the shore between campground loops you’ll pass a number of makeshift docks where overnight visitors have casually moored their vessels and hung their life vests out to dry, evidently on a first-come-first-serve basis. Across the inlet lies the boat landing, a five-minute drive down a gravel road through the woods.

The campsite we reserved, sight unseen, would not be considered glamorous by anyone. It’s exposed to overhead sun for most of the day. The afternoon shade arrives at around 4 p.m. when the sun drops below a few scraggly trees and shrubs.

But almost immediately upon our arrival we spotted a female redstart in the bushes ten feet away. Then the male. We set up our camp chairs and sat down in time to get a good look at a chestnut-sided warbler in the shrubs on the other side of the picnic table. A few minutes later a northern parula arrived, so close I could see the double break in its eye-ring.

“This is going to be great!” I said.

But it wasn’t great. A scrawny (but cute) chipping sparrow was a frequent visitor. Two flickers in the distance. A catbird sitting on a boulder on the far side of the campsite. Slim pickins.

What was great was the openness and privacy of the site. We enjoyed looking off at the distant trees, the blue sky, fireflies at night, a good view of the (hazy) midnight stars, and no other people in sight.

Nevertheless, we left camp the next morning after breakfast to hike the Norberg Trail, which starts near the landing, the beach, and the unusually sophisticated “visitors’ center,” which is modern, air-conditioned, and fitted out like a suburban showroom you’d see in Design Quarterly.

The trail is lovely, winding through mature forests with the bright blue lake often in sight through the trees. Norberg Lake itself is a peculiar sinkhole with mineral-rich, turquoise-blue water—some people might call in a kettle lake. The return route follows a different path, and it’s also fine. Three miles of beauty, solitude, sunshine, and semi-open woodland bliss.

From there we drove a half hour west to the Kawishiwi Falls Trailhead, a few miles east of Ely. The hike itself is short, easy, and popular. The view of the falls is impressive. At one point, while we were examining an unfamiliar wildflower, a not-so-elderly couple squeezed by us. A few steps later the man turned and said, “Gee, we finally passed someone.” He seemed pleased.

The day was heating up by the time we set off on the two-mile loop around Blackstone Lake, a few miles further east on Fernberg Road. The light was getting harsh and the vegetation was scrubbier. Serviceberries were in bloom here and there, and Hilary also succeeded in harvesting a few handfuls of early blueberries. A young couple was camping at the walk-in site. We could see their bright yellow tent and hear their cheery voices as they swam together across the lake. They were having fun.

Back at the car, we took a short drive down the road to Moose Lake, one of the most popular points of entry into the BWCA. In 1968, at the age of 16, I headed out from here with friends Carl and Dave for our first wilderness experience without adults. A year later, my dad, my brother, and I explored one of the most beautiful parts of Quetico Provincial Park: Agnes, Kawnipi, Cutty, Sark, Kahshahpiwi. I remember the names of the lakes, but I hardly remember the trip itself (though Agnes Falls is truly unforgettable.) In 1980 we took a trip with two other couples down Knife and Kekekabic and around through Insula to Snowbank, stopping for weak root beer one afternoon on Dorothy Molter’s island. And Hilary and I started a trip here at Moose maybe fifteen years ago, though the weather was so bad on the return trip that we paid one of the numerous water taxis that ply the lake to give us a ride the last few miles back to the landing.

Truth be told, the Gunflint Trail has always been our preferred avenue of approach to the BWCA. I remember all these Ely-based trips now, as I stop to think about it, but the Moose Lake landing holds little nostalgic appeal for me. On our recent visit, we didn’t even get out of the car.

Our plan was to stop at the Subway in Ely to buy some sandwiches for dinner, then return to Bear Head for a cheese-and-crackers lunch at the beach. 

Sitting at a table under the pines, we listened to the merriment at the beach a hundred yards away, watched a family of common mergansers swim back and forth a few feet from shore, and convinced ourselves that after seven miles of hiking, we weren’t really in the mood to take kayaks out into the increasingly choppy lake. Next time, for sure.

A Quarter-century of Films

The New York Times recently released a list of the 100 best films from the first quarter of the new century, as determined by a poll of eminent critics and filmmakers. Readers could scroll through the list, ogling the relevant posters and stills while trying to recall, if they happened to have seen a particular film, what it was actually like. They were given the opportunity to click a box after each of the films they’d seen and download a cumulative list at the end. 

This process reminds me of the one Hilary and I go through every time we peruse the DVDs at our local library or the Goodwill in Minnetonka. We’re pleased to spot films we liked, exclaiming “Oh, that was a good one,” but we rarely make an effort to see a new one. I don’t know why.

"I heard that was good ... I doubt it."

I scrolled down the NY Times list—a trip down memory lane. It turns out I’d seen 55 of the “top” 100. Some I liked, others not so much. I decided it might be worthwhile to divide the films into categories, in case anyone is looking for recommendations. (I doubt it.)

I added a category of films released in the last 25 years that I thought very highly of, though they didn’t make it to the NYT list at all.

 Really Good

The Social Network

Phantom Thread

A Separation

A Serious Man

Almost Famous

12 Years a Slave

Pan’s Labyrinth

Memento

Little Miss Sunshine

Oppenheimer

Tár

The Tree of Life

Fellowship of the Ring

Interstellar

Gladiator

Mulholland Drive

 

Quite Good

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Arrival

Lady Bird

The Lives of Others

Spotlight

Volver

Black Swan

Brokeback Mountain

Inside Llewyn Davis

Past Lives

The Gleaners & I

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Gravity

Grizzly Man

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Boyhood

Michael Clayton

Adaptation

 

Good Enough to Watch

Parasite

No Country for Old Men

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Moneyball

Best in Show

The Hurt Locker

Minority Report

The Worst Person in the World

Frances Ha

 

Fair

Roma

Amélie

Ratatouille

Aftersun

Black Panther

The Royal Tenenbaums

Grand Budapest Hotel

Spirited Away

Anatomy of a Fall

 

Pretty Bad

Lost in Translation

Moonlight

The Florida Project

And here are a few films that didn’t make the NYT 100 at all, though they should have.

Motorcycle Diaries

Touching the Void

Sideways

Va Savoir

Twilight Samurai

Into the Wild

In America

Wonder Boys

Hell or High Water

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Sweltering Masses of Humanity … and Jazz

‘Twas a beauteous evening, free ... but hardly calm.

Yes, the Twin Cities Jazz Fest was free, as usual, but temperatures had risen to the high 80s, and the streets of Lowertown St. Paul were thronged with people out to have a good time in spite of it. Some were local residents. no doubt, out walking their dogs, and a baseball game underway at nearby CHS Stadium also added to the buzz. But several streets had been closed off and fitted with performance stages, six or seven food trucks were lined up along the east side of Mears Park, and music was in the air. Jazz Fest.

We’ve heard plenty of top-flight musicians at the event over the years, including Joshua Redman, Joe Lovano, Kenny Garrett, and Anat Cohen. (I’ve been told that Dianne Reeves put on a great show at the Amsterdam Bar a few years back when a rainstorm sent everyone inside.) And gigs by local performers and students from McNally-Smith at small cafés and makeshift bandstands have also been memorable.

Defying the heat, we met some friends at the Metrodome Brewery, ate two small pizzas together, then wandered downstairs to Fingal’s Cave to listen to Trius, a trio of Prius drivers led by vibraphonist Dave Hagedorn. The joint was packed and we ended up scattering to isolated chairs and bar stools to listen to “The Girl from Ipanema” arranged to accommodate six key changes—I don’t know why—followed by a bouncy rendition of a tune from West Side Story, the name of which escaped me at the time.

As we left the club we passed a man hovering in the entryway, surveying the crowd.

“There are a few seats open in there,” I said. “It won’t be hard to find one.”

“No. I’m just checking out the scene,” he said. “I came down to hear the Four Freshman.”

I gave him a closer look: tall, curly salt-and-pepper beard.

“I guess you could be old enough to remember that group,” I said.

“The Four Freshman were popular in the fifties,” he replied. “I’m pretty sure the original members are all dead by now.” Good point.

Back on the street, we wandered west to the Fifth Street stage to listen to an all-woman group from Columbia called Las Guaracheras. Three of us sat on a low rock wall quite a ways from the stage but conveniently close to a truck equipped to dispense drinking water, while Tim went closer to stand amid the throng in front of the stage. Lots of energy and rhythm here, very little melodic or harmonic intricacy.

Once the set had concluded we wandered up to Mears Park and were lucky enough to stake a claim to an empty slab of landscaping rock facing the stage, more or less. 

Before long the entry aisle had filled with people, at which point we could no longer see much. And the level of conversation had risen to the point that we couldn’t hear much, either. Emmet Cohen’s cheerful and explosive piano work rang out, and the vocal quartet—a recent revival of the original quartet, I guess—was doing its best to belt things out across the thickening crowd of hot bodies. The second tune they did is one of my favorites: “All the Things You Are.” In fact, I like it so much I wrote a book about it. 

You can hear Emmet and the group doing the same number here.  

The Mysteries of Browallia

I might say that the lowly browallia is my favorite annual, but then it would be difficult to explain why I forget about it, year after year. We’ve planted some impatiens, taken a chance on some new shade-tolerant perennial—this year it was the wood aster—and maybe stuck a marigold or two in among the herbs out front. But something’s missing. Things don’t look quite right.

Then it comes to me: where are the browallias?

The problem stems, in part, from the fact that browallias are never in great supply at garden centers. Geraniums, impatiens, snapdragons, begonias are everywhere. All sorts of things, in fact. But when I ask a passing employee about the browallias, they either give me a blank look or say, “I think there are a few down there at the end of the table.”  

This year I made an effort to find out why these beautiful, purple, shade-tolerant plants are always in such short supply. Out at Gerten’s in Inver Grove Heights, an entire table was labeled “browallias,” but unlike all the other tables nearby, which were bursting with color and greenery, it was empty.

I asked a passing employee for an explanation. “Well, we have them for a while, but then the stalks get too tall. We deadhead them. Then, a few weeks later, we bring them out again.”

I asked a second worker in the greenhouse the same question. “There’s been a issue with the seeds and reproduction,” she told me. “It’s a worldwide problem. The day might come when you just won’t be able to get them.”

One sunny morning we drove downtown to the northside famers market, which was still loaded with bedding plants. People were enjoying the bright cool morning, eating bratwurst or drinking lattes and listening to the Peruvian music wafting in from a nearby aisle. But nary a browallia in sight.

We talked to one woman tending a booth from Waverly, an hour west of town. She had an accent. I spared her the browallia question and asked her where she was from. South Africa.

“That’s a long flight.” I said, “Do you like it in Minnesota?”

“Oh, yes. I make a little money. And people here are so open and friendly.”

At the Bachman’s in Plymouth, which isn’t far from our house, I asked a passing employee about browallias, and she directed me to a row of four spindly plants on an otherwise barren section of the table. They were the white variety—not my favorite. She took the time to check the inventory sheet and returned to report that more of the purple variety were on the way. They hadn’t been closed out yet.

“What’s with that plant?” I asked her.

Her reply, in essence, was: “Not a long shelf life.”

And just the other day we drove out to Carver Park to do some biking and see if we could spot some bobolinks. They were out in the fields again, as in other years, evidently nonplussed by the road construction nearby. We could hear their cheerful R2D2 bubbling call above the wind. Once we’d entered the woods, we were entranced to hear the equally unearthly but far more ravishing song of a wood thrush, seemingly just a few yards away, though we never saw him.

We decided to take the long way home, bought some Mexican food at the old train station in Mound, and ate lunch at a very small park—one table, one garbage can, thick grass, one stubby tree—overlooking Jennings Bay.

We were headed to Kelley and Kelley Nursery in Long Lake, now run by third-generation owner-manager Steve Kelley and his wife, Arla. Steve is well known for his annual garden newsletter, a handsome publication full of plant essays and personal reflections on the gardener’s life, accompanied by old-fashioned black-and-white illustrations drawn from a variety of Old World sources. We’ve been getting it for years. It’s conceived in somewhat the same spirit as the print edition of Macaroni, which explores a wider range of subjects but has a much smaller subscription base.

I worked with Steve a few years ago, editing and formatting a few of his essays into a handsome book, A Century in the Garden.   

At the nursery behind the house, many of the plants are still in the ground. Much of the landscape here is dotted with trees, and the acreage looks both unusual and attractive.

I asked one of the passing workers, a portly man with a wide-brimmed canvas hat, if they had any browallias in stock. He thought for a moment, and then said, “You mean that little purple flower? If we did, it would be in that greenhouse over there.” He pointed.

Of course, they had none. Out in the grounds we picked out a few shade-tolerant perennials, and as we were leaving we ran into Steve himself.

Our conversation covered familiar ground. When are you going to retire? How’s Arla doing? What are you doing about the rabbits and deer? What did you lose during the winter?

“It was a bad winter,” Steve told us. “Very cold in February, and bad snow cover.”

"I'm glad to hear that," I replied. But that didn't sound right. "I mean, well ...."

"I get it. It's nice to know it wasn't just you."

I had to ask him. “What is it about browallias? No one seems to stock them.”

“You mean that little purple flower?” he said. “Then he struck a pose as if he were thinking, and said with a shrug, “Not much demand.”

A note on pronunciation: Every person I asked was puzzled at first about the question, because I was pronouncing the plant's name wrong. They would sometimes repeat the name in what seemed to me to be an odd way, but they were right. Forget about the "a" in the middle. It's a two-syllable word, in essence. BROW-lya.

 

Low-Riding Moon

Moon events tend to be low-key and inconsequential. Blue moons—a second full moon in a single month— aren’t astronomical events at all, but merely the result of our current calendar conventions. And “super” moons are hardly more exciting. Sometimes the moon looks big, sometimes it doesn’t.

But lunar event that’s fast approaching takes place only once every 18 years, as the moon arrives at the low point of its almost two-decade swing up and down the horizon.  

This event has no practical significance, either, and it’s not impressive to witness. But I find it fascinating to consider that a thousand years ago residents of the area we now call the American Southwest were aware of it, and found it so intriguing that they built an observatory to pinpoint and perhaps even celebrate the occasion.

I’m referring to Chimney Rock, located amid the austere and haunting landscapes of southern Colorado. Hilary and I visited the stark contours of the ruins years ago. It rises above the pines, both strange and awesome, like a towering knobby ridge. 

Archeologists had long been puzzled by the presence of sophisticated core-and-veneer masonry at the top of it, typical of the Ancestral Puebloan culture centered in the high desert a hundred miles to the southwest. The mystery was compounded when scientists who surveyed the site in 1988 discovered that the buildings rested on solid bedrock. This meant that not only the stone and timbers, but also the soil and water for making bricks, had been laboriously carried by hand up the 1,200-foot escarpment from the river valley below. Why? The slightly longer growing season on the ridge could hardly justify such an enormous expenditure of labor. There had to be another explanation.

Before long someone noticed that if you stand in the courtyard of the loftiest and most elaborate pueblo you could watch the moon rise directly between the two “chimneys” further east along the ridge. Could Chimney Rock have been a lunar observatory?

Perhaps. But there was a hitch. The moon rises at a slightly different point on the horizon every month. Its position also changes from year to year, moving from north to south and back again following an 18.6-year cycle. At each end of its path, it pauses for two years before beginning its slow journey in the opposite direction. Astronomers, rather unimaginatively, call this pause the Major Lunar Standstill.

The archeologists studying the site in 1988 happened to witness the moonrise during just such a “standstill.” This meant that the moon would soon begin to rise further south along the horizon, and it would then be sixteen years before the quasi-dramatic sighting became possible again.

Clearly, the infrequency of the event was a mark against the theory that Chimney Rock had been used by the locals as a lunar observatory. But an archeologist from the University of Colorado determined, by analyzing the tree rings of the beams used to construct the buildings, that the site had been in use first in 1076, and then again in 1093, after a sixteen-year hiatus. Could it be merely a coincidence that the northerly lunar standstills of the late eleventh century began in 1075 and 1094?

Although the correlation in dates doesn’t prove that Chimney Rock was used to observe the moon, the evidence is intriguing; and the fact that sophisticated devices for tracking the moon’s rhythms have also been unearthed at Chaco Canyon, the capital of that now-lost Ancestral Puebloan world, lends further credence to the idea. It wouldn’t have been necessary for the Chacoans to calculate anything—they might simply have put sticks in the ground to chart the moon’s shambling peregrinations.

  

 It remains to be explained why anyone would care to track the moon so precisely in the first place. Well, modern observances of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are all dictated by lunar cycles, and many pre-literate societies have developed even more elaborate correspondences between events in the night sky, seasonal farming and hunting activities, time-honored myths, and ceremonial observances. Even today the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande and Black Mesa have a particularly rich set of such associations.

We’ll never know for sure what part the moon played in the lives of the Chacoan people—they lacked a written language—but the efforts they took to establish an observatory, and presumably a ceremonial center, at the top of a towering ridge of inhospitable rock, many miles from the bustle of life at Pueblo Bonito, testifies to their keen interest in the moon’s movements. Considered in that light, it becomes easy, when visiting Chimney Rock today, to envision the purpose of at least a few of the ninety-one structures that have been exposed by the excavations on the ridge.

Chimney Rock is now a national monument. If you’re interested, you can sign up to participate in programs there anytime, though it seems they’re hosting a special festival to celebrate the Major Lunar Standstill on September 23. The event may not carry the significance for us that it did for the Ancestral Pueblans, but what it lacks in spiritual overtones is compensated for by its historical resonance.

As we watch the golden orb appear between the twin peaks of Chimney Rock, we’re being moved by the same event that touched the local residents a thousand years ago.  

 

A Sweetness in the Air

Stepping out into the early morning sunlight, I was assaulted by the freshness in the air. The sky was blue, unlike the curtain of orange we’ve been living in the past few days due to the fires in Manitoba. There was dew on the grass, and I could see a few blades of fescue emerging from the ground out near the curb. How much of it will grow to adulthood I have no idea, but in the heavenly atmosphere of the morning I found it easy to enjoy.

The entire scene reminded me of a trip Hilary and I took to Burgundy in May of 1998. We brought our camping gear along in a suitcase, picked up a rental car in Brussels, and headed south. We were usually the only people camping in the village campgrounds, which were often located alongside a bend in a small but robust stream just outside of town. I was amazed, day after day, at how quickly someone showed up to collect the camping fee.

We toured archeological ruins from the era when Julius Caesar and his troops were locked in mortal combat with Vercingetorix and the native Celts—later immortalized in the Asterix comic books—and we also visited a few wine caves and museums in Dijon, Beaune, and thereabouts. We spent a few nights in small hotels, and one beautiful morning before we’d gotten out of bed two barn swallows flew into our room through the open window and twittered around briefly before departing. Was that a dream?

I’ll never forget the remarkable museum of pre-Roman artifacts housed in the local museum of Vix, which we happened upon purely by chance. The dazzling ornaments, weapons, and household items on display would give those from Sutton Hoo a run for their money. If I remember correctly, the main burial site contained a woman, her chariot, and all sorts of military and domestic finery, plus a bronze urn about six feet high that has been fashioned in Greece.

One day we parked the car strategically and took a hike through the woods past a dilapidated fish farm to the peaceful and almost-too-pristine Cistercian abbey of Fontenay. The monks used water power to perform a variety of mundane tasks, and a plaque on the wall proclaimed proudly that the abbey was the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

Every morning we’d drive into town to have a breakfast of café au lait and croissants in the dining rooms of one-star hotels where the old-fashioned wallpaper sometimes gave me the impression I’d stepped into a novel by Balzac.   

Near the end of the trip we drove up into the Alps past Lac D’Annecy toward Chamonix. We secured a spot in a huge but deserted campsite only because a maintenance man was there mowing the grass and he’d left the gate open. We chose a site from which we could see Mont Blanc out the door of our little Timberline tent.

But it seems I’ve gotten off the subject: the sweetness in the air. Great-crested flycatchers shrieking right and left. We take our daily stroll around the block. We wave at a neighbor heading to work and say hi a block away to a woman we’ve never seen before who’s out in her front yard with a dog. The dog barks at us. She's embarrassed. "Oh, he's just saying hi."

The air is not only fresh, but cool. And what about those negative ions? I’ve been told—well, yes, I read it online—that they “enhance mood, improve cognitive function, protect against airborne irritants, reduce stress, and boost immune function.” That's all well and good,  though it sounds sort of technical.

The question is, what do you do with all this fortuitous glee?

Hilary's off playing tennis with a friend. Her brother, Paul, will be stopping by soon to help me replace a few rotten boards in the deck. Or rather, I will help him replace a few boards. Or rather, I will make some ice tea while he replaces some boards. Then we'll relax and drink the tea.