Tuesday, June 24th

A HEAT WAVE … dismal, because everything in the garden is burning up just as it was at its most glorious. The peonies explode in the heat, their petals turned backward. The clematis along the fence has never been so beautiful, starry hosts, white, purple, a strange pale pink; one is almost true blue, one very dark purple, almost black. There have been great tall iris, one a deep blue, one pink with purple falls, just right beside pink peonies and a huge pink lupine. I’m amazed, considering how cold May was, that everything is flourishing.

I rather like heat; it forces a kind of holiday. Even with the fan going on my desk my fingers stick to the keys. Yesterday I just lay around. At four when a light breeze stirred the stifling air, I did go out for a big weed in the annual garden. I think I’ll have wonderful flowers this year. I’m trying some new kinds, an annual lupine, scabiosa, among them. Of course, they are only an inch high now, encroached upon by seas of grass and weeds. June is the month when everything happens—guests and garden.

Last week Polly Starr came here overnight. She was so moved by the landscape, the dreamlike path through the field, curving a little (why is it so like a fairy tale, a child’s dream?) that she went out on the porch outside her bedroom and sketched immediately after she arrived! She is an exceedingly appreciative guest. Yet after she left I simply collapsed. Next day a recurrence of the old virus.

This morning I looked out the stairwell window and saw a wood phoebe and his mate on the telephone wire. What an event!