The co-op cashier confides to me as she rings up my tomato and a loaf of bread that she loves this weather — brilliant sun interspersed with downpours. “Must be the Irish in me.”

The past few weeks have been a kind of July bonus: great growth in early June. My apple trees brushed out. I’ve placed an old desk and weathered chair on my covered porch. Recently, carrying out my laptop, I saw the desk sprinkled with gold pollen as if magic had swept through in the night. What luck, I thought, sat down and sneezed, worked.

I am of the wary bent, not to crow, don’t reveal a royal flush, a full house, for god’s sake don’t invite in bad fortune. At the little farmstand around Woodbury Lake, I park and walk behind the dilapidated barn towards the greenhouses, in search of a few more flowers for my garden, to fatten out the echinacea the groundhogs ate last year. In the tiny house, a dog barks. The farmer steps out and calls to me, my former library patron. He sings, “I’m saying it! I’m loving this.”

His words, not mine. Mine are this: in this northern realm, take in the sun and the green, store these gems in your marrow.