Today is the first day of June and we are well into our summer reading.  Actually it is more like what I am reading to my boys.  Do you remember Gone Away Lake, by Elizabeth Enright?   I have never forgotten it since Mrs. Hill read it to us in the third grade.  It was magical to me then and so charming to me now.  Here is a passage that I think is perfect for today, as I sit here with my hat head, sticky sun-screened self.  I have an array of colored paints from my ankles to my elbows and everywhere in between.  I am taking mornings off to teach art and crafts at Sweetgrass Dairy Farm Camp.  It's what summer should be.  Enjoy.

"If you could just hold onto it," said Portia, sitting back on the warm grass.

Her knees were stiff from kneeling.

"Onto what?   The weather?"  Aunt Hilda sat back on the grass, too, and pushed her tumbled

hair away from her brow with the back of her muddy hand.  She was a very pretty woman.

"The weather, partly, but mostly the time.  June like this, and everything starting to be. 

Summer starting to be.  Everything just exactly right."

"But if it were this way every day, all the time, we'd get too used to it.  We'd  toughen to it," said Aunt Hilda.

"People do. It's just because it doesn't and can't last that a day like this is so wonderful."

Good things must have comparers, I suppose," said Portia. "Or how would we know how good they are?"

"Exactly!" Aunt Hilda went back to her weeding; and after a minute Portia did, too.

I am also posting a picture of my son and his favorite person, who happens to be his cousin Lewis.  It is taken from the screened porch looking out to the ocean at St. Teresa, Fl.   A great family friend's  house built in the 1930's.  Simple pleasures, Nan