The air is so thick, there’s little difference between walking and swimming these days. High summer fog brings a certain relief to the island.

I come today to sing the praises of the simple sweatshirt.

This is embarrassing, but maybe making a public admission could save me hundreds of hours of expensive psycho-therapy:I have a thing going on — with a tree.

Lady Slippers are in a class of their own, so strangely shaped, with their pink pouched petals.

Birdsong, five in the morning. A sign that my neighborhood — a relatively new affordable housing subdivision — has matured. My neighbors’ trees provide plenty of places for songbirds to perch.

About six o’clock one evening, as we were about to sit down to dinner, there came from the other end of the house a loud thunk, as though something had hit a window. I stepped outside to see what the noise was.

During the third week of May, when the oak leaves are still just pink flickers in the forest canopy, and the pitch pines had not yet begun painting the landscape with their dry yellow swaths of pollen, then the lowly huckleberry spreads its emerald scarves far and wide throughout the forest floor.

A white postcard showed up in the mail the other day. I had been summoned to Barnstable Superior Court – for jury duty.My immediate response? Great! Hope I can do it!

The other morning, I woke up early after a sleepless night. Luckily, we have reached the moment in the year where the days stretch on, if not quite forever, then pretty close to it.

Over the past few weeks our local snowbirds have been returning from their annual winter sojourns in the south.