Friends: I had intertwined this with music, but OS won't let me embed today — not surprising considering all else that we've lost.  So, I give you a free bird photo (complete with really bad pun, in honor of really bad service at OS) and ask you to supply your own soundtrack. This is a common nighthawk in the late-evening sky.

On Aug. 1, summer here is unofficially over, and by Aug. 13, there's no doubt. The afternoon sun still might qualify as hot for a couple hours each day, but the evenings are cool and the nights drop into the 30s. Above us, already we can pick out golden aspens. To sit outdoors after dark, which comes early in a steep mountain valley, we want jeans, flannel or fleece, and a fire in the chiminea. The full moon doesn't rise over the mountain to the east until well after sunset, and until then, the stars seemed suspended somewhere below the deep, deep darkness.  

To live in this place is a privilege. To have friends and family gather is a joy. To do it year after year is more than we could ever deserve. 

The evening starts with a fresh food orgy: corn, tomatoes and local mozzarella, greens, cucumbers, spindly new carrots, tiny English peas with mint from beside the back door, chanterelles and morels picked that afternoon, homemade brown bread and fresh-churned butter, peaches picked late that afternoon, cream from the cow that grazed under the peach trees, wine poured by the vintner and summer ale tapped by the brewer, chile-nectarine sorbet and smoky piñon-caramel ice cream.

There is gluttony.  

There's music by the  the ungarage band that once parked a drum set in my dining room for five years but that enabled my son to get through medical school without loans. They've been studio musicians for names you'd recognize. Now they've gone their separate ways, to "real" careers, but for one night, they've all appeared, and with them guitars, a base, a mandolin, a banjo, amps and mikes and speakers and even an accordian named after a former girlfriend. No one will call the sheriff, because we're somebodies and because the whole town, somebodies and nobodies alike, is drinking and singing along.

The band is good, really good, and for one night, they're willing to play anything we want. No one can name a song they haven't learned in their thousand bar nights, even though they're in their late 20s and we're in our mid 50s. They play the AM soundtrack of our younger lives: Little Willy, Willy won't, go home. Oh what a night, late December back in '63. Buried him deep, in a piano box; made sure he's lyin' with his head facing up. Your sister gave me diamonds, and I give 'em to your wife. Don't know when this road turned onto the road I'm on.

Who would have thought we'd still be together, still happy, still acting like juvenile delinquents? We all sing, badly. We dance, stumbling over mole holes. If anyone is recording this, we'll all claim to have been drunk.  

"Play 'Free Bird,' someone yells, and the musicians groan theatrically. That's a request they've heard more times than they can count, in bars and parks and at wedding receptions. They give us, instead, a forgotten song with the refrain, "They don't write 'em like that any more."

There's family and friends, a whole collection of people who collectively make up our history plus some other people who've wandered by, lured in by good music, slow food, free alcohol. We've played soccer, until the ball went into Silver Creek and was swept away before we could catch it. We've played baseball, one grown son rounding the bases with a child attached like a limpet to his left leg. We've laughed until we've cried. We've eaten till we've nearly burst. We've solved the problems of the world and decided, for the 900th time, to start our own country. We've talked over one another's medical and legal and relational issues and said, too many times, "Wow, that's rough. I'm so sorry." Just as often, we've said, "It doesn't get any better than this," and we've believed it.

Now we're sprawled on blankets, with the corners folded over sleeping children, and propped up in collapsible chairs, staring into the fire or up at the moon, listening to the music. We don't want the night to end, because the world out there isn't always a nice place, and we believe these people are the best it has to offer. They're our people, the ones who love us, the ones who center us, the ones who bring us anniversary offerings of tiny mountain strawberries, copies of old photographs, wood for the fire.

Cold descends on the valley, and a silvery ring crystallizes around the moon. We know it's nearly dew time,  time for some to go home and others to go in, most to sofas and sleeping bags and we, the anniversary couple, to a real bed. No one wants to go. No one wants to move. The young ones aren't ready because they're young and they can stay up all night. The old ones aren't ready because, just for a night, we've remembered our dreams and given ourselves credit for grasping some of them. We have great kids. We have great friends. We still have each other. But winter is coming, a sharp edge that whispers along the skin of tender places. We were once 17 and now we are not. Really, that says it all.

It's time. Everyone knows it; we're all just waiting for someone else to go first.

"Mom and Dad," calls the guitarist, and through the night cuts one long note, pure and searing, hanging perfectly in the clear mountain air. "Happy anniversary, you two," he says, barely above the guitar, and we look at the fire and the moon and the aging friends and the kids coming into their own, and it's all right.