Nearly July, we’ve had rain, and we’ve had sun — an apt metaphor for life, I suppose.

Early this morning when the sun spread its inimitable crimson across the horizon, and the cats stepped on my hands, reminding me gently of their hunger, I lay listening to the birds and thinking how wrong I was to envision my life as pieces — work for these hours, sandwich in volleyball, the endless litany of email, handfuls of garlic scapes I picked from the garden, hanging laundry on the line.

Our lives — my daughters’ and mine, the others around us — flow as one stream, sometimes turbulent, sometimes sweet as a June rose petal.

I’m folding up the laptop for a few days, in this summer melody.

 According to Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer’s material falls into two categories: mystery and manners. The latter are, for the most part, observable human behaviors, often socially constructed…. while the former, which reside at our human center, constitute the deeper truths of our being. These truths we often keep secret, because to reveal them makes us vulnerable. To my mind, an even deeper mystery than the secrets we keep is the mystery of the way our hearts incline toward this person and not that one, how one soul selects another for its company, how we recognize companion souls as we make our way through the world…

— Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders