New Season.

And the first night of summer goes like this: All evening the hydrangeas in the yard wilted their rainless way toward burn and damage, and we cooked a chicken, and cooked some potatoes, and ate that with a little arugula and red wine, and we tied the cherry tomatoes to their posts out back and took the dog to bed—the boy'd been down for hours—and just after midnight the sky lit itself with more lightning than we generally see around here, three or four hundred lightning strikes over the better part of an hour, no exaggeration, and a solid heavy inch of rain, or maybe two, and wind, and noise, and the dog on the bed and the cat on the bed and the boy sleeping hard through all that strobe and bang, until 1:30 or a little later—when the storm let up, not the boy; the boy slept the night, as he almost always does, knock on wood and pray to the god of your choosing—and the rain slowed and then quit altogether, and the storm rumbled on past us to the east, and we fell back into some kind of sleep. This morning we wake up to a yard that suddenly wants mowing and that hydrangea blooming blue and full and looking not so much like it wants to pack itself in as keep right on having a go at this new Carolina summer half the country doesn't believe in, like it also doesn't believe (the country, not the hydrangea, which believes it all, every part of it) in evolution or mathematics, and there is coffee, and there is a Wednesday that has somehow already spun itself halfway through, and now the days, though we won't notice right at first, get shorter, and I wish like all hell I could give you some kind of forecast for what it is that rears up next, but that, of course, is not at all what we do here. For that you'll need professionals.