Summer is my least favorite season. The song from Porgy and Bess, Summertime and the living is easy, does not apply to me. Everything is so difficult right now. It never rains and it is way too hot and humid for us outdoor workers.

That bit of whining out of the way…the gardens are spectacular albeit very dry. All the annuals are in their glory and the wildflowers in the meadows and along roadsides are attracting butterflies like crazy.

There is an impressive stand of Queen Anne’s lace on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road opposite Winyah Lane near the phone company.

My platycodon is happily blooming in some weedy grasses and fleabane. The cobalt-blue flowers really make a statement. There aren’t very many true blue flowers in the summer. I have not noticed any of the wild chicory yet. I’m too busy in my travels trying to avoid walkers and bikers not following common-sense rules of the road.

I left a couple of garlic plants in the ground. They had formed seed heads which turned into tiny plants mid-air. They are so interesting that I wanted to see if I could bend them down into soil and get some new bulbs.

Every year, I seed some Panorama monarda. It is a lovely lavender color with an airy habit.

Both Raspberry Wine and Purple Rooster are nice additions to a monarda bed.

I know it’s early but I seeded some more sugar snap peas for a fall crop. SBS had them for sale at half price. Often, I wait too long and can lose them to a frost. It’s weird because they can stand a freeze in early spring when they are small but the full-grown plant is not so hardy.

I neglected to start bachelor buttons and nigella this past spring. No matter – they seeded themselves all over the place from the previous year’s plants.

On Tuesday, I yanked all the dried-up bachelor buttons and crumbled them up on a few areas in hopes they will give me a repeat performance next year.

Covid has made day-to-day life exhausting. I rarely stop at stores or coffee shops as the long lines in the hot sun are off-putting, to say the least.

Then, just when a person thinks she has reached the summit of her patience, regular life events surface. Now I have a toothache. My earliest possible dental appointment is not for three weeks. There will be no more great garden salads or lightly sautéed vegetables for me. It’s soups and smoothies for me. 

Allow me to digress – my favorite dental joke: a man stands before the judge…“Mr. Criminal, I’m sorry but our prison system is overcrowded. We’ve scheduled you a series of dental appointments instead.“

I need to haul out the thesaurus. I see the newscasters struggle to find synonyms other than “lies” to describe the words of our president. They say misrepresent, inaccurate, fact-challenged, dishonest, falsehoods, questionable and not true. It’s just plain pants-on-fire. The fake statistics he throws around about the coronavirus are past laughable and are downright dangerous. He is still blaming Obama for the “empty cupboards“ he inherited.

His interview this past week with Fox News host, Chris Wallace, was telling. He was extremely defensive and, I think, increasingly cornered.

I wasn’t surprised to hear him actually admit he was thinking about not accepting the results. After all, he didn’t like the numbers in 2016 and he won, for Pete’s sake.

He keeps calling Joe Biden “sleepy.” I, for one, could use a sleepy president who lets me relax, get some rest and stops this endless anxiety.