It's the morning of July 17, and summer is here in all its glory. This has been a cool, low-humidity, gorgeous week, and today begins another glorious day. On mornings like this, I'm reminded of a passage from John Knowles' A Separate Peace:

One summer day after another broke with a cool effulgence . . . and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air, something hard to describe -- an oxygen intoxicant . . . some odor, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it. . . . I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because those mornings were too full of beauty for me.