the start of summer

I always have a sense of summer beginning with our first trip to the Farmers' Market in Santa Fe ... here, the marigold-threading woman has just started with her first strands.  So dinner was a French Hen, stuffed with garlic scopes and lemon (ok, this not being Los Angeles, the second of those came from Whole Foods), and baked over diced potatoes and rosemary, and served with some mixed salad greens and some miniature carrots - red and orange and yellow - boiled just long enough not to be raw.  And prefaced by some goats' cheese.  With that inside me - eaten sitting out on our patio, with the wind kicking up around us, and looking at the far distant hills in the sunset - I can just about bear to contemplate the fact that I have to write a summer school syllabus.  But that, too, is something that I've done so many times here that it, too, seems like a rite of the season.