August is right around the corner, and the crickets and grasshoppers have begun their late summer songs. I love sitting on the patio and being surrounded by those songs. With the swirl of voices, the backyard feels so alive.

However, there is not much time for sitting on the patio today. My husband, Clif, and I are hosting a potluck gathering for some of the people he works with. One of them even offered to bring lobster for lobster rolls. How could I refuse an offer like that?

Soon, I’ll be making potato salad and getting the house ready. It looks as though the weather is going to be good. Could it be that we will actually have one whole day without rain? Maybe so. After all, August is usually one of the loveliest months in Maine. With the way this summer has gone, all bets are off, but I’m hoping this August will be true to form, and we will have hot, dry days and lovely cool nights.

Rain, rain go away. Don’t come back until the gardens dry out. Not too dry, of course. Neither extreme—too dry or too rainy—is desirable. But enough already with the rain. For the first time in the nearly 30 years we’ve lived at the little house in the big woods, our front steps were covered with green mold, and my husband had to scrub them. Here’s hoping that the weekend is warm, but not too hot, and sunny.

From the New York Times: Gary Paul Nabhan writes about drought, climate change, and food shortages. He also lists some commonsense solutions.

From the Kennebec Journal: A piece about the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan, Maine. There’s a real renaissance in grain growing and bread making in Maine, and the conference is a reflection of this.

From the blog treehugger: A description of Ben Greene’s Farmery, an “innovative sustainable agriculture project” where food is grown and sold at the same place. A vision of the future or just another one of those good ideas but…?

From NPR’s the salt: In New York City, doctors in a new program are now proscribing fruits and veggies to overweight patients. Could be the beginning of a promising trend.

From the Portland Press Herald: Anne Mahle’s take on pancakes, with some wonderful suggestions for a berry topping and a syrup. (Ah, pancakes! How I love them!)

From the Guardian: Two excellent pieces that are related. One is about a young mother in England who lived in poverty, had a tiny budget for groceries, and blogged about it. The other is about the rising cost of food. While both feature the United Kingdom, both are relevant to the United States.

Today, I spent the afternoon reading on the patio. It was actually hotter outside than it was inside our home, but on a summer day without rain, I can’t bear being inside. So during the hottest part of the day, I stretched out on two patio chairs and alternately drowsed and read Bee Wilson’s excellent Consider the Fork, a brisk look at how cooking implements have changed through the ages and have thus changed the way we live.

The ice in my iced tea melted down to nothing. The humming birds went from the bee balm, now in bloom, to the feeders. In the woods, crows called, and branches snapped. A grasshopper landed on my foot.

While I was drowsing on the patio, my husband, Clif, and our daughter Dee were at the Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) in Waterville. They have full passes and will be seeing four movies today, which means they started at noon and will return some time around midnight. On such a movie marathon day, someone has to stay with the dog, and that someone is me. I like movies, but not four in a row. Clif and Dee are the true movie buffs. Compared with them, I am a piker who likes no more than two movies in a row, and truth be told, one at a time would be just fine.

The film festival runs until next Sunday, and I’ll get a partial pass, which will allow me to see ten films. During the week, there are “only” three movie slots per day, and this suits the dog’s schedule better than four movie slots. Because of MIFF, I probably won’t be blogging much next week.

Today, before it got really hot, I made a batch of gingersnaps for us to take to the festival next week. We always pack a cooler full of food and drinks to take to MIFF. Better for the budget, and, gingersnaps notwithstanding, better for the waistline. (We also bring fruit and healthy sandwiches.)

However many movies a person sees—10, 20, or, yes, even 30—the Maine International Film Festival is quite an event, one that really perks up Waterville during the summer. There are people on the street, and they talk and argue about the movies they’ve seen. Directors and actors come and give talks about their films.

Coinciding with the film festival, the Colby College Museum of Art will be having a grand opening of its new addition, the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion.

Readers, if you live within driving distance of Waterville, there are lots of reasons to go there this week.

From the Portland Press Herald: Poor children in all of Maine’s counties are getting free summer meals. It’s too bad we need such programs, but since we do, it’s good they are expanding.

From the Grist: Nathanael Johnson takes a look at genetically modified food in an attempt to come up with a reasoned conclusion about the pros and cons.

From Nation of Change: Sarah Grothjan writes about a thriving farmers’ market in Athens, Ohio, which also happens to be one of the poorest counties in the state. Grothjan thus disproves the myth that only affluent communities can have thriving farmers’ markets.

Again from the Portland Press Herald: Jeff Peterson’s recipe for grilled tofu and coconut rice. Sounds delicious, but I would probably marinate the tofu in some kind of garlic, ginger, soy sauce marinade.

From Letters from a Hill Farm: Nothing in particular, just the whole darned blog. Nan writes about food, her farm in northern New England, books, movies, and anything else that strikes her fancy. She had taken a break from the blog, but now she is back, and how good it is to be reading her posts again.

From the New York Times: Going on vacation? Melissa Clark has some suggestions for simple dishes to prepare. Those of us who prefer staycations might even want to try these recipes at home.

Let me come right to the point: So far, it has been a terrible summer. Either it has been so blindingly hot that even I can’t stand it—and I can take a lot of heat—or it has rained so much that I haven’t been able to figure out when to feed the potted plants. I keep waiting for a few sunny days in a row for the soil to dry out at least a little, but those sunny days in a row haven’t happened yet.

Instead we have rain and drizzle followed by more rain and drizzle. On the plus side—the gardens and the potted plants aren’t exactly thriving, but they are holding their own. However, the slugs and the snails positively love this weather, and in all my years of gardening at the little house in the big woods, I have never seen such a slimy onslaught. Each day, I go out with a jar of soapy water and pluck the snails and slugs from my plants. Irises seem to be their perennial of choice, and all those little munching jaws have made ribbons of many of the leaves. I have literally picked hundreds of snails and slugs in the past two weeks, and it gives me no pleasure to kill these creatures that are, after all, just trying to make a living. If only they would make their living in the woods. I would never bother them at all. But when they come into my garden and start ripping through my plants, I have no choice but to go on the offensive. Gardening is not for the faint hearted, that’s for sure.

I am hoping, perhaps vainly, that today the weather will clear at least enough to allow me to have lunch on the patio. I’m not asking for sun, mind you, just no rain. Then as I eat my pita-bread sandwich stuffed with Farmer Kev’s lettuce, raw slivers of his turnip, some of his roasted beets, and a sprinkle of feta, I will hear the whirr of the hummingbirds’ wings and watch these tiny birds come to the feeders filled with sweet water. The nuthatches, chickadees, and finches will fly to the feeder filled with sunflower seeds, and sometimes it will seem as though the forest positively flutters with little wings and darting bodies. Then I will think, how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place, rain or shine, summer, spring, fall, and even winter, when patio days are just a memory from the past season.

Scenes from the backyard on Thursday, July 11, 2013: