When does summer start for you? What’s that first day you have to do something, or something is done to you, that you stop and think, This is it. This is summer. We turned on the air conditioning for the first time this week when the weather got all hot and sticky. If I hadn’t stopped and thought about it before then, I did as soon as that cool, sweet air began to fill the rooms of Our Humble O’Bode.

And lately I’ve noticed, as I’ve been standing in the kitchen window taking those first few life-giving sips from my morning cuppa joe, that the temperature hasn’t dipped below sixty all week. A couple mornings back I glanced at the thermometer right after I turned on the kitchen lights and it was seventy. That doesn’t happen unless it’s summer.