It is nearly ten pm and it is still very hot here in my house.  My forearms are sweating against the table. The air is perfectly still.  The dogs are sprawled with their bellies exposed to the air, hoping for a breath of cool.  In a little while, CR and I will retreat to the basement and what we call the summer bedroom.  It is heaven to sleep there.

It has been quite hot in Colorado, and much worse elsewhere.  In these dog days of summer, it is hard to remember all the things that are so great about the long hot days of July and August.  Why we look forward to them all year, and in my quest to be in the moment, here are 20 things I love about summer.

1. The smell of tomato plants, hot in the sun
2. Fresh berries
3. Watermelon cut into cubes in a bowl in the fridge
4. Reading all day because it is too hot to do anything else
5. Movie dates in the air conditioning
6. The nutty brown of my forearms
7. Barbeques
8. Birds singing and singing and singing at all times of day, even in the still of the night (”Blackbirds singing…)
9.  Flipflops
10.  The whiskey barrel full of evening primrose and sage against the fence
11.  The laughter of the girls next door playing outside all afternoon
12.  The sound of sprinklers coming on
13. Hiking all day with my friends then going to drink beer and eat without guilt
14. Going to Manitou Springs and eating saltwater taffy
15. My mother’s deeply shaded backyard in Pueblo, with a tables full of family gathered beneath the trees
16.  Pellegrino with ice and one key lime squeezed into it
17.  Long walks in the long evening
18. Crickets
19.  The astonishing moon, rising in the east like a spaceship
20. Staying barefoot all the time

What do you love about summer?

creative commons photo by ecstaticist

You can preorder at Amazon or Random House (not yet available through B&N). Or sign up for a one-time reminder via email here.

EDIT PS  I posted this in the comments, but it belongs here, too:  Oh, Lost Recipe definitely has a love story at the core.  It’s a very sexy book, too, on so many levels.  Many of the comments so far have been along the lines of, “whew!”

But how could it not have an erotic edge, with all the food and love and rediscovery going on? What do you want to do when you fall in love with life again? Make love to it!

Mine secret weapon is winning cake walks. If you ever really, really want that Black Forest Cake, I’m your girl. I once staggered home from the school carnival with three beauties–I still remember that one had coconut frosting.

How about you? What secret talent do you own?

But what I stumbled over yesterday was the chocolate cookbooks.  Ultimate Chocolate, which has the most amazing photos, and 1001 Chocolate Treats and The Chocolate Cookbook.  It made me think about the great cookbook I discovered while writing Elena, and weirdly, about a special on honey I saw the other day–the way bees make honey and how they create the combs, and what you can do with honey when it is put in jars–and about other luscious things.  

Do you have a favorite cookbook?  A favorite novel with recipes?  What is your favorite sinful food treat? 

creative commons photo by beatbull

I’m thinking tonight of my cat Leo, who was killed Saturday night by a fox or a coyote. Probably the fox I’ve seen trotting down the street so boldly, owning it. The fox who steals my strawberries and leaves his poo in my whiskey barrels.

I don’t know why Leo was out in the middle of the night in the front yard. He doesn’t (didn’t) do that any more really. He stuck close to the house, sunning himself in the backyard, never straying far away. Or so I thought. Maybe he was out every night all summer long and I never noticed because he was home by morning, weary and sated from his hunting. The dogs have access to the backyard through the patio doors, and Leo used it, too.

It seems so odd that he’s gone, that he was there on Thursday afternoon, grooming Athena. That he sat with me on Friday night, in the basement, watching movies. Purring, glad to have me to himself. Sudden death is so hard to encompass. He was just here and now he isn’t and how is that possible? How does the earth go on, while he’s missing from it? I remember feeling so surprised when a friend of mind died suddenly in college, that everything was just the same out in the world, that we all just kept on. It’s so shocking. Joan Didion talks about it in her Year of Magical Thinking. How can it all look the same for everyone when it is so different for me?

But therein lies the beauty of our individuality, our own attachment to THIS one, and THAT one. This very specific being, never to be repeated, individual life. There are so many of us in the world and all through history, and so many cats who have lived and died, so many the world over; and yet, this one, this one, is never to be repeated, ever again. Not in all the history of the world, in all the countries, in all of time. This cat and I lived together in this particular time.

I keep worrying that I will forget his very particular ways, his himselfness, all the things that made him uniquely Leo who lived now, with me, all these years. There is no reason to think that I will, since I remember them all. My delicate little Piwacket and Thoreau, slim white shorthairs, so alike and so different; but I found each of them under a car at different times. Moses was a big black and white male, like Leo, but he was tougher and rougher and never loved anyone but me. Before Moses was Giovanni, a rather nervous cat at times, who lost a leg somehow in the middle of the night. He lived fine without it. They’ve all been with me, stayed with me. So will Leo.

I was grieving Moses when my father found Leo at a PetSmart. We went to lunch and my dad took me over afterward, and Leo reached through the bars to grab my sleeve. He had a funny way of focusing, maybe he was a little nearsighted, and would sort of shake his head in a fast, focusing way, and he did it that day and made me laugh, so we bonded from that moment on. He was black and white and long haired. Not so long it was annoying, but long enough to be very soft against your hands. He walked a little awkwardly, so from behind he sometimes looked pigeon toed, especially because his back legs looked like pantaloons. Waddling a little. So cute, that tail up in the air. He was not a terribly big cat, but he always thought of himself as much bigger. When he was a kitten, we called him Walter Kitty, because he was so full of himself, stalking humans or dogs or the biggest, wildest things in grass. He was always a good hunter, specializing in baby birds and cicadas, from which he would eat only the tender green middles, and leaving them twitching on the sidewalk. More than once brought down a squirrel, which he didn’t bother to eat, but left on the porch for us. He was a very confident fellow, very sure of his place in the world, serenely so.

He used to like to sit on my front porch in the old house, with his paws propped up on the lower rung of the wrought iron, his lower body flowing behind. The front paws looked like he was wearing spats. So pretty, and he liked it when I stroked them. Through the winter, tiny white tufts of long hair grew between his toes, and he loved going in the spring to be groomed, getting all that old hair off his body, being washed and combed and petted into perfect beauty.

When he was a young cat, he loved playing hide and seek with me. We ran through the house, first him chasing me, then me chasing him. Hiding, trying to freak each other out. He would play for literally hours, and I made a fool of myself running through the dining room, dipping behind doorways.

He was eleven. He arrived in my life on exactly the right day, when I was slightly blue and feeling changes in the air and he brought VERVE! And HAPPINESS! And SNAKE HEADS! into my life. He stayed through the deaths of my grandparents, and my divorce, and my boys leaving home, and our move to Colorado Springs. He was never ill or unhappy a day in his life.

Christopher Robin found him in front of the house on Sunday morning. A violent death, but quick, and not a car, which I would have hated. If Leo himself had chosen his exit, it would have been something dignified enough that he could tell the tale as a lion would, on the other side. Shrugging—sometimes the hunter becomes prey. I keep thinking of an afternoon over the winter when he came rushing into my office and jumped up on the windowsill, and I looked outside to see the fox trotting down the street. How it all lined up, in the end!

Yesterday, I went to get his ashes (the box is like a beautiful gift box, white and slim and tall, tied with blue ribbon) and I planned to come home and get some work done. I was so sleepy on the drive that I put them on the table and took a nap, and then, when I woke up it was rainy and cold and I still tried to get some work done. But I only wanted comforting things. Brownies, cheese, graham crackers with cinnamon sugar. I made a cup of tea.

Finally, I gave up. Not all days have a big sorrow in the middle of them. Sorrow is a true and honorable feeling. It is not the opposite of joy, but a part of it. I love, therefore sometimes there is the sadness of loss. I still choose love. I still choose joy.

They never stick around quite long enough, do they? And yet, how thin and small and dry my life would be without them.

See you on the other side, baby. Love ya.

So I turned over and snuggled in.  The girls nudged me again.  “Get up! Now, before the sleep burns away.”

Long experience has taught me that I will far more regret not getting up than actually obeying the prompt, so grumbling, I put on a sweater and made some tea and blearily made my way to the computer, with no idea what I was going to do when I got there.

Turns out we went to a breakfast joint where there was orange-cinnamon French toast being served to a weary firefighter in the mountains.  There was a woman drinking coffee.  Mountain bikers filling the air with testosterone as they waited for the sun to rise.  It was a whole scene.  Very rough, but early morning writing often is for me, and I’m not bothered by messy (even extremely messy) rough drafts.

The scene introduced an important location and a person I hadn’t met, though he’d been lurking around at the edges of the stage, waiting for his chance.  I liked it all very much and was, in the end, quite happy to be awake writing it.

Who knows how books get written, how the creative process works?  I don’t.  Sometimes, I’m embarrassed to do something like that, fall out of bed early and stagger to the computer, or stay up really really late, writing.  It seems precious.  Odd.

And yet, when the muses or the girls or God or my own subconscious woke  me up this morning after so many days not writing, I was willing to go.  Show up.   The scene would likely have arrived at some point this week anyway, but who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t have.

Now I think I have to go find the makings for homemade raisin bread.  I used to be extremely good at making bread.  Haven’t done a lot of it lately.

Do you ever do things at strange times of day?
Creative commons photo by kindagetmego

Also, a link to a few more photos from the walk. 

Yesterday, I was pleased  to realize my body felt okay.   A little weary, but that’s to be expected (especially given the week of travel before the walk itself).  Training works, as CR said.  Only sore muscles are on the front of my ankles and a little in my hamstrings.  Stretching also works.

I gave the dogs a short walk yesterday, which loosened things up a little, but afterward, I had to take a little nap.  Today, I gave them their full walk and an hour later, my arms are still shaky.  Still haven’t built the glycogen stores back up.  Honestly, I doubt it there would be so much fatigue if I were not also recoverying from a week of teaching very intensely. 

Luckily, the creative centers are firing happily and the girls sent up a really gorgeous bit of decoration for the MIP, one I hadn’t seen coming.   They really did just want to go sit on the beach that day, I guess.

I’m eating watermelon and drinking tons of water.  I have, however, seen enough of my pal Gatorade for a bit. 

Far more worthwhile were the stories I heard along the way, and the tags I read on the backs of other walkers: This is for my mother. Sister. Best friend. Myself. “The beautiful brown-haired woman walking next to me.”

Miles walked: 39

Blisters: 3

Sunburn: none, since I took care of my high-altitude sunburn much earlier in the season. Excruciating sunburns I saw on pale skin unused to this sunshine: many

Pictures I erased because I thought I looked too fat for public consumption: 5

Women I met who had had double mastectomies, thereby making me ashamed of ever worrying about how I look instead of how healthy I am: 3

Favorite sign: Big or small, save ‘em all, which just made me giggle for ages

New friends I made on the walk: 5

Fundraising total: $1936, largely due to you, all of you out there in blog land and reader land. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

The story of the weekend:

As we approached the finish line, a young woman next to me said, “This is your first walk, right?” I said it was. She smiled and said, “don’t be surprised if you cry.”

I think I was too tired to cry right then, honestly. I wasn’t thinking about anything except the ice cream they promised was waiting at the end, and taking off my shoes and finally going home to sleep in my own bed after almost ten days on the road.

But now, as I try to sort through the images, the moments, the stories that will somehow sum up what this is all about, I find myself enormously emotional and overwhelmed. I think of the woman, with her spiked, streaked hair, who was walking in front of me at one point. We started talking. She told me about her sister, Cookie, and said today would have been her birthday, if she had not died of breast cancer seven years ago in her early 40s.

I am an athletic person and in love with walking, and this was hard work for me. So I was deeply moved by women I saw who were struggling to finish the first five miles, much less all of them. That takes courage and bravery and a lot of fortitude. There were athletes, too, stringy and strong, powering through, encouraging others to keep going, keep moving, believe. A woman of nearly 70 has now walked almost 100 walks and raised 3 MILLION dollars. Imagine how many lives her efforts have prolonged or saved.

Tonight, I am exhausted and my dog is not leaving my foot until he makes sure I’m not leaving again soon. But this was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done and I will be doing it again next year. I hope some of you will think about doing it yourself.

And again, thank you so much for your support. Next year, I’ll find other sources.

I’m eating the chocolate cookie they gave me when I checked in at the business man’s special, a Holiday Inn or Ramada, one of those.  Not far from the airport, where I was stranded all afternoon.  Some plane didn’t make it for hours and hours, and it stranded lots of us.   The poor clerks took the brunt of it, and they were very good, hustling to find me a flight to get me to Colorado in time to get to Keystone tomorrow, which is all I care about.   I leave at the crack of dawn, so early that when I told the clerk I wanted a cab for 5 am and he said the airport doesn’t open till 5:30 and I could wait until 5:15.  

The room is seventies chic, updated, but not obscured. White painted brick walls and a groovy vibe.  There is a great pond in the middle of the courtyard, but since I didn’t make a reservation, that is not my location.   I had not had much to eat since lunch and hiked out in the dusk to see what I could find.  Found a supermarket but mindful of the walk back, only bought some rice cakes and soda water.  Thus, I made do with cookies.

I have to say that I very rarely get stranded while traveling, so this is rare.  I feel badly about missing the awards ceremony tonight at the conference, when I could have been there after all.  This afternoon, when businessman after well-tended matron after pink-golf-shirted Masters of the Universe were cursing about not getting to their destinations until Saturday (one of them Denver!) I was worried that I might miss the walk, and was very agreeable about everything except not getting to Colorado tomorrow morning.  It took hours, but they found me a route.

C’est la vie.  This, too, is travel.  It isn’t like getting stranded in Denver during a blizzard and all the food running out.  Or left behind in Paris the day after 9/11, which happened to a friend of mine. Or getting stuck during Katrina in New Orleans.  It isn’t even driving across the midwest as a mixed-race family with two young children during the floods in ‘93, trying to get to a conference.  This is ordinary stuckness.   I didn’t have to sleep in the airport.  I have a bed and plenty of comfort. 

What is your worst getting stuck story?