Tiger's Blood.

I was away from my home for the last few months, but I'm back to the American West. Man, this place crackles with magic in the summer. It billows with lazy pride in the faint breeze.

Driving around my hometown with the windows rolled down on a late August evening, through warm dry gentle air like a kiss on the lips -- this is what peace is made out of. I'm convinced drives like this increase the net calm in the world, and I pray that it wafts across oceans and into hearts around the globe. I know what you're thinking: fossil fuels, &c. I'm considering all that and I still think if you were the one driving, and I were in the passenger seat, you would hasten to uphold my claim.

The snow cone shacks, which sprout here each summer from the dry ground, have become sacred spaces to me. I won't let Summer go by without going to burn a candle to the gods of ice and liquid sugar, who must also be the gods of youth and sun-bronzed skin. Their oracles keep appropriately casual vigil at these seasonal shrines to the fleeting, bone-deep joy of mortality.

But without doubt the essence of the season's spark is fresh peaches. One cool point in the Mormon cosmology -- and I don't know where this idea comes from or how institutionalized it is, but I love it -- is that God enlisted the help of his noble and great kids in the creation of the world. Since childhood I've felt that in that great collaborative effort, my baby was the peach. Or at least that I fetched coffee for some assistant producer working on an early draft of the peach. I'm so happy it has done well.