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Summer seems to have arrived all of a sudden, in a humid rush, at least in terms of warmth in the air, after a cold June, although the vegetable and ‘lower’ animal worlds have known summer for some time. A friend who grew up in Sussex told us the other day that strawberries were ready to be picked after the middle of this month not too many years ago, but this year the U-picks have been going for more than two weeks already. And my wife tells me a remote field at the back of a neighbour’s hayground—a field that has sometimes been plowed but hasn’t been planted for a long time—is full of Blackeyed- Susans in bloom, although the Old Farmer’s Almanac from down in the New England states says they are in bloom there around the sixteenth.

When I take the dog out for his walk at the end of the evening I see more fireflies, even up around the house, than I can remember ever seeing here.

They remind me of childhood summers in Pennsylvania, and sitting, as dusk fell, with relatives on the big side porch of the house my great-grandfather built after the Civil War, a citronella candle burning to ward off mosquitoes, half-listening to the quiet talk and quiet pauses of the adults, the sound of the occasional car passing down the main street out front, and the rhythmic squeak of the porch glider with its cushions that smelled of waterproofing, and a bloom of firefly light amongst the overgrown shrubbery at the edge of the yard, sometimes high up (“Looks like the weather will be fair tomorrow”) and sometimes lower down almost to the ground (“Looks like we might get some rain”). And the conversation would go on to discuss the state of the crops and the pastures and a thousand details of life lived in the country when the old saying still rang true: the best fertilizer is the footsteps of the farmer.

This year, I wish the fireflies here were flying lower. Although there has been rain nearby, and a good deal of it, we have gotten only tiny showers that barely register on the rain gauge. I must go out this evening and drag around some hoses attached to tiny sprinklers so as to give at least some of the plants a bit of relief from the drought. We’ve been carrying buckets of water to some trees we just planted—a clump of three young white birch and a sand cherry—almost daily.

The birch clump is looking good, but the sand cherry’s growing tips have been neatly nipped off by a passing deer some nights ago. So far the deer have left my wife’s garden alone, but there are an awful lot of them in the neighbourhood and we no longer have a dog that feels strongly possessive about the whole property.

We can’t do much about the deer, short of getting into major fencing operations, but as far as rain is concerned, this might be a day to watch, thanks to the purported influence of a long-dead Bishop. Today, the fifteenth day of July, is St. Swithun’s day, and, if it rains today, it will rain for the next 40. (Of course, if it doesn’t rain today, then it won’t rain for the next forty). It’s a not-so-old story (the first recorded evidence for it dates from the fourteenth century, 500 years after the Bishop’s death) that got attached to a holy man who died more than eleven hundred years ago. He was a learned man, the Bishop of Winchester in the south of England when Winchester was the royal city of the kings of Wessex.

Bishops in those days were close to their people, and there is a lovely story of the Bishop who liked to sit for a while each day and watch a bridge being built.

One day, as he was sitting there he saw one of the workmen maliciously bump an old woman carrying a basket of eggs and the eggs fell and broke. So the good Bishop caused the eggs to be made whole again.

That, of course, is something that ‘everyone knows’ to be quite impossible, even for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

Is the story true? Well, who is to say? Why do we believe that there are strange things elsewhere that we don’t see here, but deny that saints could do in times past what can’t be done by us today? Whether he healed the eggs or not, it is also said that St.

Swithun is the saint to pray to in case of drought, and perhaps that might not be a bad idea, unless the rain has visited us since I wrote this column.