August
These are the sultry days of deep summer.
August, and about the time of year I begin looking forward to winter. More precisely, about the time when I begin to let go of the flourishing spring and summer seasons. For one thing, nature is not flourishing anymore, in the sense of being full of energy, new life, and growing. These are the sultry days of deep summer. The new broods of ducks and geese on the pond are nearly as big as their parents and paddle past us with smug expressions, heads aloft, skipping out of line with the grown-ups. I think of them as eager to get on with the big trip south they have been hearing about since day one. They are ready. “Wanna fly.”
We are waiting for the fruit on the apple and peach trees to ripen, which it is doing without urgency, growing fat in the heat, hanging idling, unaware that eventually, the tree will dismiss it to the ground with a sudden plop. Off you go. Good luck. We remember the excitement over the spring blossoms. All the work since has been happening in the basement, unseen but important—like most basement work.
Yellow, Black-eyed Susans, and Queen Anne’s Lace are what remain of native perennials in our field and along the roadsides, surrounded by the spent flowers of pink clover. Phlox blooms are arriving, getting more plentiful around the property every year. But, mostly, we have been preoccupied with dead-heading plants, such as the mountain laurel, the hostas, and the daylilies. Their flowers have come and gone and what remains has folded into the dark green tableau of the season. I could not tell you at this point which variety produced which color flower. I will have to wait until next year to be reminded.
The one thing left to bloom before the autumn colors take center stage will be the white and blue wood asters, which are among my favorites because they are the late bloomers. I am a fan of late bloomers. Ask yourself, where are all the early bloomers from high school? (Folded into the tableau with the rest of us.)
The lawn has burned out in the usual places. I am down to cutting it every seven or eight days instead of every four. By mid-month, it will be every ten days; well-timed for when I am tired of cutting it altogether.
I am at the point of letting go of spring and summer.
I had an Aunt afflicted by seasonal affective disorder, appropriately (and neatly) known as SAD. Not I. I have had enough of cutting lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow, and dodging black flies in time for rescue by each new season. Having said that, autumn is the only season that has me slightly panicked when it comes to an end, which it does abruptly, generally with one significant downpour that strips leaves from the trees. We say there is no spring in New Hampshire, that we go from winter to summer with an intervening mud season. But there are crocuses, then daffodils, then buds on the trees, and birds returning. Winter rolls into spring. Summer rolls into fall. Fall just ends. Most years we wake up one morning, the leaves are gone, and the wait for snow begins, which is like anticipating highwaymen you have been told are riding toward the village. We wait and watch from indoors.
I woke up at four-thirty yesterday morning and it was dark. The last time I woke up at four-thirty in the morning—not too long ago—it was light, and the birds were active and singing. I am glad that it is dark again at four-thirty in the morning. If you have to get up that early, your reward should be darkness. Where is the return without it? If you are climbing back into bed after only a moment, it should still feel like nighttime. If you are beginning an early commute, it should feel satisfying to be across the starting line as you drive past your neighbors' dark houses.
A few times when we were young, my father collected us from bed in the morning for a ride on the commuter train and a visit to his office in New York City. We would go to lunch, then be placed on the train home where my mother would be waiting to collect us. Of all the impressions left by those occasions, one looms larger than the rest: it was dark when we got up, as we ate a hurried breakfast, and left the house. As children, nothing ever separated my father’s world more from us than the fact he was up before sunrise and gone before we were downstairs. Once a year we would be allowed to step across that boundary.
It is the time of year I begin to let go of the spring and summer seasons. But there is plenty else I can hold on to.