Truly “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” **  So, as July speeds by, I tap out a list of things I’ve really appreciated of late, hoping that you, Dear Readers, might also enjoy and/or find useful.

• Julia Moskin’s “Best Gazpacho” (https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017577-best-gazpacho).  Like most everywhere this summer, New Hampshire has been HOT, but this recipe makes a perfect cold, savory, light supper (and goes especially well with an open-faced BLT).  Tip:  Julia says to strain the soup once blended.  Don’t!  Throwing away any bit of this tasty treat is a mistake, and together a blender and olive oil produce a perfectly emulsified, almost fluffy soup sans straining.

• Planting in the rain.  We’ve had soooo much rain that I was having trouble finding the right day to plant two new perennials, a shasta daisy and another bee balm.  Then I went ahead and planted in a pretty steady rain.  Result:  I stayed cool, got no bug bites, and the new plants settled in beautifully. 

• Bats!  I love their swooping at dusk.  When late the other afternoon I spotted one little fellow napping upside down while clinging to the apse stucco behind the eastern most Alberta Spruce, I feared he might be ill.  But when I checked the next morning, s/he was gone, I’m pretty sure of his/her own accord.  Yay!  Go bats!

• Birds!  Not only do I dine with my bird feeders in my direct line of sight (the birds eat when I eat; following two bear incursions this summer, I no longer leave the feeders out unsupervised), but I cheer the clever birds (crows and magpies, perhaps others?) making excellent and ironic use of anti-bird spikes to build their nests!  You go, Birds!

• David Copperfield.  I think I’d not read Dickens’s most autobiographical novel since high school—maybe earlier.  When I zoomed through it preparing for discussions of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, I wept, I laughed out loud, I marveled at the Master’s sui generis art.  Best read of the summer so far.

• Daylilies.  Thriving on our plentiful rainfall, they have never been more abundantly beautiful.

• Extended Fourth of July celebrations.  Eat picnic food all through summer—especially deviled eggs.  Best way to hard boil:  steam for 15 minutes and plunge into a bowl of ice water for effortless peeling.

• The Daily Stoic:  366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman:  very practical life hacks culled from the Stoic philosophers offered in bite-sized bits.  Reading one a day I find a very useful antidote to the diurnal dose of world-wide Bad News.

• “The Paradox of Pleasure” episode of Shankar Vedantam’s science podcast, Hidden Brain, featuring Dr. Anna Lembke’s research on addiction.  Our brains, evolved to deploy dopamine to motivate our seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, can’t cope with the fire hose of easily attained pleasures available in contemporary life.  Where once you had to search for and then climb a tree to be rewarded with a tasty date, now you can order a crate of dates for front-door delivery at the click of a button.  Check out Lembke’s explanation for why the rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide are highest in the richest nations.

• Just do it.  Nike nailed the best advice for tackling really unpleasant tasks (scraping scale-infested amaryllis leaves to give the plants a chance, digging soap scum crud from the corners of a sliding shower door, sorting years of accumulated stuff, weeding the overgrown flower bed, etc.)  The sense of virtuous accomplishment is sooo worth the yuck.

• Always have something to look forward to.  Like the next images of cosmic splendor arriving from the James Webb Space Telescope—absolute proof that there IS at least some intelligent life here on Earth (the evening news to the contrary).  Thank you, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency for showing us both previously unimaginable beauty out there, AND the astounding feats humans working hard together can accomplish.

CARPE DIEM!

**Sonnet 18, by William Shakespeare.  Worth memorizing.