Last month our local coffee roaster retired. For years I enjoyed visiting her little roasting hut to watch the beans dance in her roasters, conversing with her, laughing together.

But with her retiring, it meant learning how to roast coffee beans myself. What I didn’t expect is that watching the beans dance in the glass roaster is a pleasing way to medidate, to let the thoughts that dance in my mind quiet and go away.

It doesn’t take long to roast green beans to a caramel brown hue, fourteen to fifteen minutes. And near the end you can hear them crack several times. Not loud, ear splitting cracks. Just gentle, soft, soothing cracks.

So once or twice a week I roast 9 ounces of coffee beans, 255 grams, to get 8 ounces of fresh roasted coffee beans for the hopper in our coffee grinder. Instead of conversing with Gilda, I converse with the dancing beans.

The tansies are in full bloom. A single tansy has spread over the years to many. The bees love them. So do I. Tall and colorful, tansies look wild and shaggy. Not quite graceful enough for a proper garden. Perhaps a bit too weedy looking. I’ll keep letting them spread. They suit me and the bees well.

I hadn’t considered hydrangeas as bee flowers, but why not? This bee’s pollen sacs are plump. When she flies home she’ll be greeted as a hero.

The sky is so summer like with wispy clouds. They look so frail and delicate, like they would tear if you could run your fingers through them. But the long, delicate streaks they make speak of fierce winds high aloft, winds strong enough to blow a house to bits. Better they blow up there than down here.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is on fire, burning up in the hottest summer in recorded history. We’ve been spared the relentless heat. So far it’s been a pleasant summer, warm days, refreshingly chilling nights, a few rainy days here and there. And no smokey skies that make you hack and cough. So far. Every day the skies are blue and the air fresh is a day to be grateful.

A note to Comcast email users, last month Comcast banned my emails. Evidently someone with a Comcast email address marked an email from this site as spam and is blocking all email from here to Comcast email users. So if you have a Comcast email and wonder why you’re not hearing from me, this is why.