Thursday haiku sent to Bond from the porch of my friend Jenn's little Vashon cabin:

sky fades to dark
i hear rustling meadow song
island sleep is best

The sky out here in the summer is so violet and substantial. You could put it in a bowl and stir it, feeling the resistance of its lavender honey. (Debby knows what I mean!)

It's a "go we forth from our Council Fire" kind of night; peaceful, still, quiet, and reverent. It's a night for tucking the kids in, then walking along the trail by the water, listening to the adults decompress and consider the emotions of the week. Pairs might sneak off to unused campsites. Somewhere a guitar is softly playing a lullabye to the Misty Mountain girls. The gravel crunch-crunches as night patrol begins.

It is a night like the best night of camp. Birds fly back to nest in the eaves of Shutanka. Otters swim back up the creek pipe to settle until the morning. Here and there a flashlight peeps from a balcony, a window, a sleeping bag. The beach smells like hot rocks and wet towels and forgotten flip-flops and milk-carton candles and "darn goods" and forlorn towels without nametags sewn into them.

The air doesn't move. The night covers me. You have to be carefully taught.