Nature has Her own inscrutable patterns and cycles. Ask the landlocked salmon, who mysteriously manages to swim upstream for hundreds of miles, there to spawn and finally, of course, to wind up on a bed of chipped ice at Hannafords. Okay, so maybe don’t ask the landlocked salmon.

But candidates and journalists and bloggers and campaign volunteers and online politics junkies have a cycle of their own: each year they return to the Hamburger Summit, where they eat grilled meat and thrash out the thorniest political issues of the day. This year marks the fifth anniversary of this venerable tradition.

And we’ll be back on Burlington’s North Beach, under the vast and spreading Tree of Knowledge we’ve all come to know so well. Mark the date now, and begin inter-family negotiations to make it happen: July 17, 1-5 in the afternoon. That would be roughly five weeks before Primary Day. Sweet.

If past experience is any guide, the weather will be gorgeous, the sun hot, the shade cool, the food delectable, and the crowd ready to take any political conversation well beyond its logical endpoint. More details as they emerge.