Snapped this picture way out nowhere in Montana recently. For some reason, I felt compelled to re-post it today. God bless America.

Sitting out in the backyard this morning on my chaise longue, reading the NY Times (Sunday is the only day I get hard copy.), I read articles we would talk about if we were sitting around together on an old-fashioned Sunday.  I began to cut some out, deciding I didn’t want to scan them to you.  This week, my cohort will be receiving actual clippings in the mail. Just things we might have mentioned were we together.  I’m not a fool.  I don’t actually expect you to read the clippings.  We all rely heavily on the delete key and the “recycle-unread” bin.   Delivery of the Sunday Times costs $5.00.  Crazy. Even crazier: a first-class letter costs almost 60¢. 

A few weeks ago I started reading the daily post “The Writer’s Almanac.”  In contrast to the news you might wake up to, this is a positive way to start the day.  I still miss The Prairie Home Companion radio show.  Keillor ends every post with this very good advice:

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

Today is the first day. Celebrated the solstice last night with some friends. Drank wine. Ate fruit and cheese.

Made head wreaths out of flowers.

And watched the sun set.

Now today is appropriately hot. I love it. But then I have a nice cool house and we have so few hot days at the 45th parallel north.

It is one of those days if you turn off all your electrical things from 5:00 until 8:00 you somehow save the world and save a little money on your bill.

I don’t much care about the money, but I do enjoy living off the grid for a few hours.

I downloaded a new book on Kindle to read. I’ll read using the battery. It’s about a woman who lives on a houseboat in Sausalito. She was raised by her grandfather who made things on a lathe while she watched. My daddy let me watch him at his lathe and taught me how to make a few things. I loved doing that. I might buy myself a lathe at some point.

Yesterday was also Father’s Day, one of those Hallmark holidays. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are hard for many people for many reasons. The wise rector at St. Paul’s never mentions them.

We all brought a picture of our fathers and shared them and told something about our fathers. It went pretty well. I showed this picture and told the funny story about how lightning used our primitive TV antenna as a lightning rod and blew out the picture tube all over the room where Daddy had fallen asleep in his chair. I love these family legends. They get better with every telling. He was very handsome. That’s a fact. Not a legend.

Most of us kept our “sharing” positive, funny even. But one of our number was clearly harboring negative memories of her father who had died thirty years ago. She waxed wordy and couldn’t seem to shake it off. I already knew she has challenging relationships with her sisters and mother so this explains a lot. I really think it’s more or less that way for everyone, but some can’t shake the painful, negative things and some of us choose to not. Maybe that makes me shallow and trite.

Back to going off the grid: I am prepared. In addition to the book, I have a quart of DQ vanilla in the freezer. Cool.

I often think of this, how I’m still that happy, joyful, hopeful, expectant girl inside that I was so many years ago.

Someone else expressed it this way:

“I asked an elderly man once what it was like to be old and to know the majority of his life was behind him. He told me that he has been the same age his entire life. He said the voice inside his head had never aged. He has always just been the same boy. He had always wondered when he would grow up and be an old man. He said he watched his body age and his faculties dull but the person he is inside never got tired. Never aged. Never changed.”