Ah, these are truly the days of summer, the days that start cool and clear with a slight, freshening wind. They warm up to temps in the seventies by midday, they’re not too humid, and the evenings are long enough to sit on the back stoop with a beer after supper where we can enjoy watching the birds at the feeder without too many bugs flying around our heads. These are the days I wait all winter for. And they’ll last maybe four more weeks, if we’re lucky. Then, either the mosquitoes will begin relentlessly feasting on us in swarms so insufferably large that spending more than five minutes out-of-doors will be considered lunacy, or the temperatures, together with the humidity, will climb so high that the act of merely getting out of bed in the morning will be enough to make me pop a sweat. At some point in August both the mosquitoes and the sweat will combine to make the end of summer the most miserable time of year, and I’ll dream of the subzero days to come.