Saturday started with sleeping in, which I needed, but which also ate into my time outside. This is why it’s helpful to have a backyard or a beach. You can throw on a bare minimum of clothing and go back to sleep outdoors. But I did eventually get myself out and down to the garden, where my harvest included two sweet potatoes, most of the rest of this year’s basil, two types of sorrel, and several tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos,

I met up with Rudi and we took ourselves up to Petworth, to one of our local bookshops, which was having a sale. I bought the short story collection Black Boy Joy and a collection of poems written on bus commutes. After stopping by the house to feed the cat and drop off the car, we took ourselves out to Art All Night, the annual celebration of late-night art. We visited an embassy and an art space in our neighborhood and then metro’ed downtown to the park by my old office, which has been rehabbed for the past year. They’ve done a beautiful job of updating the space, and if they can find a way to let the homeless use it unimpeded, I’ll be totally pleased with their work. We ate some jollof rice from a Nigerian food truck, enjoyed some music, and then took ourselves off to the library.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library is our main library and reopened during the pandemic after a major renovation to the Mies Van der Rohe building. And after a public dedication during normal business hours, they opened it up for alternative programming for the festival, with juggling, community performances, a Black art pop-up, a film screening, and an outdoor hip hop show by Black Alley.

Today was chiller, with a trip to the farmers market and later to a farm, where I picked apples, and the Tonys concert. Overall, a good weekend, but over too soon.

How was yours?