This is The Week, the peak week of the year, the summer solstice, when days are endless and your brain, high on light, says you'll live forever. Yesterday the temps were in the 90's and I was in swim suit and shorts all day and hung out on the dock and dozed in the hammock and swam in the lake every couple of hours to stay cool and did a puzzle on the coffee table listening to World Cafe and it was like summers when we were on vacation here. As the days, so shall my sentences be.Today Melissa and I went to Camden for Sister Bernadette's ceremony of final vows. Unity is a one nun town, and several folks went to support our bread making nun. The ceremony went about 90 minutes in a small church with only the occasional breeze through the windows. The stations of the cross were the chief wall decorations. No wonder we're a violent society. The dominant religion is full of violent images. The whole flash from the past experience was capped off when they gave out Our Lady of Perpetual Anxiety holy cards with the date and occasion on the back. Like a ride in a Studebaker. There were a small variety of nun brands there including a Discalced Carmelite. If nun watching were birding, that would be the equivalent of spotting a painted bunting, at least as regards rarity. As to plumage, she was more like a brown-headed cowbird. "Discalced" means without shoes; for the record, this one was wearing Birkenstocks. There were other diocesan hermit nuns there. Most of them have left traditional contemplative orders like the Carmelites and just live in cabins in the woods, hermitages. This Tuesday Melissa becomes president of Rotary. Another old hippie co-opted by the Establishment. Oh, do email Her Eminence some congrats and condolences. Say, does that make me first lady? Consciousnesses will be raised. We have never been so civically involved as we are here. Music is the commuter's friend, and some days it takes all the Blind Boys of Alabama to get me there. That's a great album. This week I bought the new Lucinda Williams album. The song "Bus to Baton Rouge" has everything I need in a song: a shell driveway, fig trees, camellias, and a house on Belmont Avenue. I've converted my favorite albums to MP3's and listen to them on a portable player (Memorex, $99.99, includes the car kit, Amazon.com) that will play regular CD's, CDRW's, and MP3's. I put a mix of 160 cuts onto a CD and put it on random. It's a joy. I just finished reading The Sylvan Path, a narrative of a solo camping trip in forests of Maine, Tennessee and Michigan by Gary Ferguson who signed and left it at the Heron when he stayed there a couple of months ago. In the middle of Sylvan Path, I stopped and read Carl Hiaasen's Sick Puppy, a very funny but also deeply satisfying tale of a charming eco-terrorist in Florida. Who hasn't wanted to punish an SUV driving litterbug?

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