What a Beauty This Day Has Become

As I sit here, beginning this post late in the day, July 5th, the western sun streams over my neighbors’ roof and into the window to my right, turning my tuxedo cat’s mostly black fur into velvet black, and lovely. She, Maria, has tucked herself into the crook of the futon-couch that serves as a perch for her and Petey many days and evenings so to cautiously watch (read: stalk) the robins, the wrens, and sometimes the chipmunk, all of who seem to like to hang out in either the Rose of Sharon that grows beside this window, or the fence post that demarcates my neighbors’ section of the stockade fence that borders two sides of my property. (I constantly think of Robert Frost when I think of the fence–his tongue-in-cheek, “good fences make good neighbors” line in his poem of “Mending Wall”).

My neighbors are a husband and wife whose ages bracket ours (he older than we, she just younger). She is teaching herself to play the ukulele, and it is a pleasant plucking to which I am listening as I type here. Happily, unlike Tiny Tim, she doesn’t feel compelled to sing the songs she is accompanying with her 14″ (nut to saddle dimension–look it up!!) soprano ukulele.

It’s sweet, this day, here in Massachusetts. It’s the kind of summer day that removes regrets, stills sorrows, dresses gardens in light, and front stoops in satisfying shadows; that shares bird songs, tree limbs sighs, bee hums, and childrens’ giggles; that captures light and carries it through shrubs, porch railings, leaf flutter, and even leaves of grass. Today I am content and grateful.

Today I wish you joy. I wish balm on the many who are not so graced as I feel today.

And that is all I will say for today, and with it I bid you, until next time!!