Last night had the feel of a summer night in the country. Smartmom sat on one of the new green, Mission-style plastic chairs, talked with her neighbors, and munched on snap peas from the Coop.

The kids — three families combined — were a wild and running band of playful children. They numbered 8. Four from one family and two each from the other two.

Maybe it was the chill in the air but it felt like an August night on Long Island or Cape Cod. The Third Street traffic was our ocean. The wind, a reminder of the natural world that so often gets drowned out by city racket.

The kids exercised an inventive playfulness that reminded me of summer night spent building playhouses out of a refrigerator box on the lawn at a friend’s country house in Orient Point.

Or romping with a huge family of four at Candlewood Lake back in the 1960’s. Feeling that rugged freedom borne of summer friends and country air.

Glow sticks seemed to be the thing. So as the kids ran, little wands of green and orange light accompanied them. At one point, one of the glow sticks got caught on a high ledge of the building and they had to figure out, as a group how to get it down.

They started a club called the Glow Stick Club, OSFO told me. “It’s fun having a club,” one of the other girls whispered to her mom.

Mr. Kravitz brought home a bottle of fancy Partida tequila from the office.

“Gotta make Margaritas, I guess,” said Mrs. Kravitz.

Smartmom told her that she had Triple Sec and lime juice. That there was a Margarita recipe on the label of the Triple Sec. The two made a bee-line to Smartmom’s apartment for the ingredients.

Smartmom ain’t no drinking girl since she decided to lose weight and liquor is just sugar. Still she sampled a sip of Margarita and it was tasty. And it went to her head (two weeks of not drinking, what do you expect?)

And it went to other people’s heads, too. The conversation was light and playful. Something came up that Mr. Kravitz told Smartmom she couldn’t write about but Smartmom has no memory of what that was.

Mrs. Kravitz told of having a tough week. Mother of Four, a new character in these tales, is a divorced mom with four children and a wonderful white mutt named Rufus, shared an inspiration she had that day about what she wants to do with her life.

Hepcat came down to fix a broken night-lite that one of the kids was really sad about. Smartmom was deep in thought about the things she is deep in thought about. Distracted, sad. There is much on her mind.

Somehow, the old “how I met my husband, how I met my wife stories” came out, which sequed seamlessly into birth stories…

Tales of Petosin, epidurals and cesarians in hospitals; stories of babies coming out so fast and sudden at home that there wasn’t even time to call the midwife, call the doctor.

Summer breezes. Sugar snaps. It was that kind of night at the Third Street Cafe.