While There’s Still Summer

I last saw her two weeks ago, climbing up the compost tub we keep by the kitchen sink. A wasp without wings, dusty and moving slowly, carrying the weight of a difficult summer on her thin and papery shoulders.

I feel you, sister.

There’s something about August that makes me go all melancholy and pensive as the fireflies wind down and the crickets ratchet up their leg-singing game ‘round the clock. It’s soothing music to my ears and I’m grateful for it, but it also lays bare the truth that days are getting shorter and our outdoor to-do list’s window will close for another long nine months. I didn’t get everything done this summer either. I never do. But wow, do I try. And that’s during summers where we aren’t running two markets and Patrick didn’t have back surgery and I’m not starting a new job and our only bathroom isn’t being remodeled all in one bustling bundle of activity. I still tried this summer, giving myself as much grace as I could scoop out of what I hoped was a bottomless well. I let my eyes glaze over the all-but-abandoned studio where colorful bookbinding paper and board lay patient and still, confident of my return once the silver maple leaves hit the ground. In a fit of optimism, I bought three pillow inserts on Saturday and stacked them on a sturdy promise to update our living room decor by the end of the holiday weekend. We’ll see…

Each of the seasons holds out its generous hands spilling over with splendor and we relish our front row seat to the abundance they bring in turn. We’ll be as barefoot in winter as we are in summer (though for shorter periods of time) because few experiences match the indulgent comfort of putting on thick warm socks fresh from their hook in front of the space heater after walking bootless through the snow to get the groceries out of the back seat of the truck. We keep a watchful eye on the creek during the rainy spring and autumn stretches, and our brows furrow when the creekbed’s rocky bones stick out of the soil from late June to mid-October. But the land never fails to delight, impress, overwhelm and silence us and we let her lead us willingly into the next festival of life and birds and dormancy and fresh basil we grew ourselves.

It’s just that August takes all that project-necessary light and shrinks it incrementally as I race the sun to finish up the grapevine-pulling and thicket-clearing and path-trimming that demands our weekly attention. Turn our backs and a freshly mown yard turns to knee-high quackgrass in a blink. I get all ambitious and over reach on my expectations (I’m not 30 anymore and won’t be again) kind of like when I put too much filling in a tortilla on “make your own burrito” night and then wonder why I can’t eat it by hand. And I miss the morning chorus of sparrows and redwing blackbirds and finches insisting I’ve slept long enough (I don’t disagree) and won’t I please join them out in the woods where all the fun is? Too soon they’re handing over the keys to the cicadas and katydids who clearly have as much to say and not as much time to say it. It’s still music, though, and as welcome in my ears as that first house wren setting up shop on the kitchen windowsill. When it goes all silent in November and I’m alone with my thoughts, I’ll almost forget what they sound like until March and ask their forgiveness for my memory’s neglect.

So I’m holding onto these last weeks of summer with both hands, noticing that the northeast corner of the meadow is packed with wild yellow wingstem and green-headed coneflower and the field to the east can barely hold another tall stalk of purple-topped ironweed. Who doesn’t love a season that begins with wild garlic mustard everywhere (we have three pints in the freezer made into pesto) and wraps up with delicate shade-loving goatsbeard and unashamedly prolific goldenrod? I’ll plant tulips and garlic in October and leave them to rest and feel smart for doing that once they push past their mulchy straw blankets next April, right about the time our hummingbirds (four of them now!) regale us at the feeders with stories of their travels from Costa Rica. The paths back to the woods will still receive my bootclad steps as often as I can for as long as I can when the mercury dips below freezing and I’ll touch the crisscrossed bark of the black walnuts I know intimately, trusting they’re still awake and not really sleeping like it looks.

On the walk this morning, just near the young sycamore sapling I strapped up after finding her bent at the knee from a punishing gust of wind that almost took her down, I saw a single daisy among the Queen Anne’s lace and withering milkweed, shy but resolute in its presence. Daisies had their heyday right up until late June, then dropped their petals and made room for the rest of summer’s floral bounty. How did this one survive? I asked but she kept her secret so I didn’t push. Sacred reminder at the toe of my walking shoe that summer is still with us for another precious twenty days until it imperceptibly becomes autumn on the 23rd of September at 2:49a.m.. We’ll awaken and head to the market, not expecting all the trees to shed their lives in one ambitious drop.

There’s still time…