The sun has come out in this dark June, bathing the 2 beds and half the lawn, creating a magic of trembling chiaroscuro in the apple-boughs. The flower-beds, irregular, one eye-shaped, the other a rough pentagon, each ringed by mossy rocks, have been cleared. The old apple-tree reaches for light from the left side of the window, the green fruit hanging in clusters among its curling leaves. They came in noisily, calling and flapping, paddling even as they hit the water, stirring it to foamy green. Offshore a flock of Canada geese has landed by the bald crown of the tidal rock.

The great picture-window, at which I sit, looks out on the little lawn, hemmed in by a sloping laurel hedge, then a fringe of heterogeneous overgrown plants at the top of the bluff dropping to the high-tide water. So it is peaceful here: and peaceful outside. An isolated creak of a floorboard somewhere, and otherwise, just the high-frequency trill of my own ears. From the kitchen: a single plop of a water-drop falling from the faucet. I made some notes in my prose sketchbook:ДЄlmost silent: faint cawing of crows outside now the quiet reverberation of a boat engine here in the living-room I hear only a tiny electric sound: maybe a clock running. I took a lunch break at about 12:30, then went to sit on one of the deep-rose loveseats by the picture window. When Mom and Jackie had left, I worked on. I'll go through every transaction in order to get good data to plug into the master Excel workbook. I sat at the dining-table and proceeded to enter bank-statement data into Quicken on Mom's laptop. I drove out at 10:30, as she and Jackie (who had taken today off work) were preparing to go to a lunch date in Port Coquitlam. I just got the facts: the act was Edison Lighthouse, and the year was 1970.ДЄfter my morning notes ( Rubicon, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ), I had my own office-work to go to: estate accounting at Mom's house. So I said it was not later than 1971, probably 1970. I knew it came out earlier, I thought maybe the late 1960s. Kimmie remembered lying on her mother's bed listening to it in 1974. We tried to remember who did the song ('the Cowsills?' I guessed 'No,' said Kim, with a definite shake of her head), and when it came out. This morning Kimmie and I paused to listen to 'Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)', and were taken suddenly back to our childhood years. This morning I was the one to switch the radio on-a cheap little Radio Shack job that sits on top of my upright chest of drawers. JACK-FM is the radio station Kimmie listens to in the morning as she gets ready for work. It was pouring a warm rain as she left for the office. Kimmie told me that on JACK-FM this morning they confirmed that this has been the 'darkest' June in recorded history, with just 149 hours of sunlight (at that time), compared with the previous record-holder, June 1953, which had 150-odd.

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