Hello again from Sarah Graves, writing to you from Eastport, Maine, where we have survived the Fourth of July and are well into the sweetly peaceful stretch between it and the Pirate Festival. And the Salmon Festival. And we just had the British are Coming festival, and Indian Days are the week after next, and — well, you get the idea. If things get any more festive around here we’ll have to bestow a liquor license on the whole town and just put beer or at least wine coolers in the children’s lemonade stands.

Also, fireworks. Can I just say right here that I like fireworks as much as the next person? That is, if the next person happens to be a nervous golden retriever with hyperacute hearing and complete confidence in her ability to make me sleep on the floor with her until she stops shaking. Which will be next week. Actually, fireworks on the Fourth of July itself are one thing. Store-bought M-80s, cherry bombs, and other implements of auditory mayhem set off at random by sozzled Neanderthals with little or no…er, I mean, they are entirely another. Although my dog doesn’t think so.

Meanwhile, I really did have a mole on my toe, and it was the weirdly interesting kind of mole that all the literature says if you have one like it, you should See Your Dermatologist. What they really mean, though, is that your dermatologist should see you, and especially the mole, and he did. While he was seeing it, I said, “Do you think this should come off and be sent to the pathology laboratory?” and he said, “Stick your foot out.”

Next thing I knew, I couldn’t feel my toe, and the next thing after that was, the mole and I had parted ways forever. None of it hurt except for one teensy tiny pinch. Really, the whole thing was a piece of cake, they treated me with absolutely heart-melting kindness from start to finish, and just four days later I learned I did not have a melanoma, which is a very fine thing to learn, let me tell you, and definitely worth the trip. Also, just in case you have a mole that you keep trying to tell yourself is nothing, can I say again about the Didn’t Hurt part? Because it didn’t. So even if they want to take it off, go for it.

Finally — As you can see I’ve sort of sprinkled a bunch of Eastport pictures in here at random. This time of year it kind of knocks the breath out of me, all this summeriness everywhere, so it’s hard for me to be coherent about my pictures (some people say that’s true about me all year round) but I thought you might like to see them anyway. So here they are.