There are mornings and then there are mornings, right?

Today was one of the really good ones.

As I sipped my first cup of tea, a neighbor pulled up to my riverside dock on her Hydro-bike, a popular pontoon-bicycle contraption; my wife and I own a pair too. She stopped by to say good morning, deliver a loaf of sourdough bread she had just baked, and to rendezvous with my wife who was heading out on her stand-up paddleboard.

And then, as if on cue, my dog rushed out onto the deck to bark goodbye to the two women as they pedaled and paddled upstream.

I don’t believe I have ever quoted the late Ronald Reagan. But, as I watched the two head off, Reagan’s famous campaign phrase, “It’s morning in America,” jumped into my mind.

Fresh-baked bread, a generous neighbor, and a picture-perfect morning weather-wise on the water easily eclipsed the all-to-common, start-of-day tsunami of nonsense and unsettling news of the federal government.

Instead, what news grabbed my attention was hopeful and positive, read while I........

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