And now this from the “with friends like these” category.

It’s Great Outdoors Month, according to the present Bush Administration. This is utterly remarkable for many reasons. But since Sunday, June 8, is also World Ocean Day, I’ll begin some celebratory columns with a voyage seaward.

Three people really got in line at 4 a.m. to see Barack Obama in Bristol, Va. 4 a.m. Really. Well, I say they got in line. More accurately they formed what would eventually, after the fourth, fifth, sixth, etc. people finally showed up, become a line.

Don’t feed the bears.
Sounds easy enough, but apparently not everyone’s getting the message.

What is your favorite day of week?  Just venturing a guess, I would bet that for most of you, the answer to that question would be Friday or any other day associated with the weekend.

A clop-clop-clopping clatter caught their ears.  At first, they thought Billy Goat Gruff was running away.

When the minister arrived at the nursing home, he found his parishioner sitting alone in her room. “I am worried sick,” the 95-year-old woman explained. Trying to pinpoint the source of her anxiety, her minister began to question the woman.

In the last two weeks, Terry and I had friends pass away. Both were elderly, hers was 82, mine 94. The contrast between the final services for the two was striking. It was also saddening.

Piney and She were amused at a news program on CBS and also on BBC that remodeling was to be done at Trinity Church at Stratford Upon Avon, the church where Shakespeare was buried.

Each brink-of-June, the word “commence!” leaps to life in my awareness. Maybe it’s the flood of verdure in the rural landscape, the buoyant crowds of roadside weeds, draping willows, layers of leaf canopy, “the ten thousand greens,” a Spanish speaker told me they called summer in his native language.