The sun no longer rises in the Summer Solstice window. Nearly two months later, it marks our Two Dot summer drawing to a close. Every day is packed now. Finishing projects in the schoolhouse and the studio, visiting places one last time, performing the rituals that we have established for ourselves. Sunday we went on our annual picnic with Richard and Alicia. This year we went up Spring Creek on the mining road. We drank beer under the trees at the edge of the creek where it is barely five feet wide and clear as glass rippling over rocks made gemlike by the water’s covering. Our conversation flows as easily as the creek water, illuminating and exploring ideas that I think we may live with daily, but only bring to the surface occasionally and in particular settings. Many of those occasions for us are with Richard and Alicia. The picnic continued with brats and potato chips. We justify a well-balanced meal with a few carrot sticks, and wash the whole thing down with a fabulous bottle of Malbec wine from the Altos vineyard. The wine is a payback for having drunk Richard’s fathers day bottle of wine, though I will never admit it to his face. We complete the picnic by losing Maggie, Richard’s boarder collie. It happens every year, and every year Alicia says we won’t bring the dog again. And every following year Richard stands firm, “dogs belong on picnic.”
