So here we are at last in the summer of our dreams.

How long has it been?

How many years have we sat damp and sullen, sipping our gin by the flickering stove making stoic remarks about yet another lost summer? How many times has the sleet rattling on the windows sent us muttering back to the city, glad for the car’s heater? How many times have we dropped to our knees and begged Mother Nature for one perfect summer such as this? Today is Tuesday of our second week. I haven’t had time to do anything useful, too busy swimming. Oh, there’s so many summer’s worth of swimming to catch up on. Record-high temperatures have warmed the water to a silky bath, barely cool enough to refresh, never so cold as to chill. We hang in deep water on pool noodles so swimming is effortless, just kick, and move your arms a little. We dip constantly. We dip between chores, at the afternoons end, any time we feel the heat we leap in with a hiss and get cool again. “Are you wearing a swimsuit? What for?”

Each day has begun and ended with a spreading pink glow. Mist settles over the lake and brings a slow-motion sense of time, – a sense that you must slow down and savor the pine breeze. The sussurating air licks you all over. It licks. Every inch of your bare skin; and there’s lots of bare skin around here this year. My main wardrobe is a pair of old grey shorts and some twenty-year- old Bass Weejuns, which have never been polished. I have been granted permission to be shirtless at meals. Cottage Life has been a daily cycle of dawn-rise for the fishing, muffins and newspapers on the screened-in porch, some sort of project or chore, a swim, a brunch, lying about with crossword puzzles. Then more projects, more swimming, cocktails, splendid dinners with wine, ending with us sitting dazed, bathed in candle glow watching through the trees for the stars and bats to come frolic in the sky.

Sometimes we have weather, fierce storms rumble in from the North ripping the towering cumulus with ragged blasts. We’ve developed a fine sense of storms. We feel the breeze changing ever so slightly and our ears perk up, and we’re alert to the breeze moving around the compass. And there’s always this point when we just seem to know it’s time to run and button down the boat house and drop the storm flaps on the kitchen porch. Then settle inside with the lights turned off watching the gathering doom. Last Thursday we had wonderful storms. A file of boomers rumbled along the northern ridge, getting bigger, getting darker, getting closer, until we raced to get ready. Our thunderstorms always come from the Northwest or West and they boil up with a scary suddenness from behind the ridge called Blue Mountain. A blue-black mass, with a tinge of green, and lightning billowing within, races down the lake and beats upon our North and West walls. When this happens everything gets wet in the cooking porch. This is an old cabin with flaps for window covers on the porch that don’t actually seal anything, and the rain sprays at will when there’s a wind behind it.

This day was no different; a white blast of horizontal rain erased the day and engulfed the cottage in a swirling vortex of snapping blue thunder. Fire-hose rain blew through every seam, and we sat in the dark ducking at every too-close crack. Ducking is silly, we know, you cannot dodge lightning, but we duck anyway. The rain shuttered us in grey light and filled the boat to near sinking. Then as it passed to the far shore a rainbow formed, then a second ring. We watched from our sheltered porch as the flashing swirls of cloud sneaked away and let us be. And then we had a sunset. There was just time enough to grill the evening meal before the showers came again. We went to bed serenaded by rain and the muffled rumble of the storms moving on. They tell us there was another storm sometime around midnight.

Next day waking, warm, embraced in another pink mist. Golden-yellow morning light ripples the cabin walls and plays about the old wooden rafters. Song sparrows tweet about and little wet drips go spat from sixty feet up in the pines. It is time to gather the fallen limbs, sweep the twigs from the deck, pump out the boat and go get the newspaper.

First, perhaps, a swim.