I write on Tuesday evening for the Wednesday morning pick-up. I hope the weather forecasters are right that we are due for a cold front. We are so hot and miserable and by me I’m including my poor garden. Back in my waitressing days in a non-air conditioned restaurant, we would be extremely busy for hours. Our favorite comment was “if we went to hell we would be going on vacation.”

I made a decision to become amused by, rather than irritated with, the traffic. On Saturday, a mother turkey with four tiny babies held the line for sometime as she attempted to gather them for the crossing. Shortly after, a man with a dog in a backpack pedaled by.

In broad daylight, midday, Bambi and his mother were enjoying the plantings on Skiff avenue in Vineyard Haven.

I picked up the new phone book at the Post Office. It’s so much smaller now that most folks only use cell phones. I confess I still have a rotary phone so therefore I’m still in the phonebook. Sorry—my brain is fried with the heat and humidity.

When you go up South Road almost to Beetlebung corner, check out the impressive stand of crocosmia —the red ones, I think the cultivar is Lucifer. See what I did there—after mentioning hell in the first paragraph.

I usually pull over for the lemonade stands of children. I rarely drink it, but do like to support young business people.

In the spring, I covered the cole crops (broccoli, kale, cabbage and kohlrabi) with mesh fabric to protect them from pests. They grew so large, they were hindered by the cloth. I took it off intending to fix it. Then, as one does, I busied myself elsewhere. Now they are hosting the larvae of cabbage moths and who knows what all. Never one to waste food, I soak them in salt water during the preparation. Thanks mom for guilting me about the starving children in China. (It was the Fifties).

On my trip up-Island on Sunday, I noticed the Dorothy Perkins rose threading its way up into trees and poles on the roadsides. Unlike the red Cape Cod Rambler or the White Multiflora, it’s lovely eye-catching pink.

I might have to open a Monarch butterfly farm—I’ve never seen so much milkweed. It has taken over a large portion of my sorely neglected vegetable garden. At this point I don’t have the heart (or gumption) to pull it.

Of the 13 presidents in my lifetime, not Trump, there is no one who did such a good job of dismantling the federal government. There is so much alarming news daily, it’s difficult to keep up. I think chaos is the point. The media keeps normalizing his behavior.

I’m not ready to even process the catastrophic flood and loss of life in central Texas. I’m still mentally working on the “Alligator Alcatraz” situation. Trump seemingly likes to fantasize about alligators eating human beings. Didn’t he want to put them in the Rio Grande to keep migrants from crossing during Trump ’45? The most upsetting part is the fiendish delight expressed by some of the devoted MAGA folks. We’ve lost our collective minds. Have mercy!