On savoring the summer
I'll be back to it all again before long
It’s Sunday morning and we’re sitting on the back patio with plates of huevos rancheros balanced on our laps. I have my feet up on the covered solo stove, and I’m leaning back in the Adirondack chair looking out into the yard. A dragonfly wafts by, circling around and around, looking for a place to set down. The hummingbirds have found the wild orange flowers that have started blooming again, popping up amidst a tangle of grapevines and pokeweed along the wire fence. I watch one dart in and out of every blossom before speeding away vertically into the trees beyond.
“I think the bluebirds have left. We missed them again,” I say to my spouse Janyce just as she lifts a big forkful of eggs, cheese, and black beans to her mouth.
For the past few weeks we have been sitting out here in the mornings with coffee, and in the late afternoons with a mocktail in hand and the Spotify chill mix emanating from the portable speaker. We watch as the female and male adult bluebird pair take turns scooping up tiny worms and moths from the grass (this is their second brood of the summer) and fly over to the birdhouse to a chorus of cheeping from inside. Today the little wooden house is silent. Our dog is out on the patio with us, lying on the cool bluestone step, surveying the premises for a rabbit or any sign of Woodman poking his fat woodchuck head out of the hole by the side of the shed. Cicadas buzz to a fevered crescendo and then stop. I swat a few lazy mosquitos niggling at my bare ankles, noticing that the late morning sun is getting hot.
It’s August. This is the time of the summer when a little bit of panic starts to set in. Wait, we haven’t been to the beach enough. We haven’t been to an outdoor concert with a blanket spread out on a manicured lawn in the center of town, a stuffed picnic basket by our side. I haven’t read a novel!
I’ve been finding it difficult to pick up a book lately and I haven’t been writing as much either. I don’t know if I’m just terribly distracted or if I’m doing it exactly right—studying the flora and fauna in my backyard, following along with the bats circling above the rooftop at twilight, with my head tossed back on the edge of my chair, or simply staring into the woods just as the sun dips down and sparks the horizon into a glow of pink and peach.
A friend of mine texted me this morning. She sent me a picture of her daughter in a tiny bikini, her arms wrapped around her handsome boyfriend, the two of them standing and smiling in front of the waves crashing at the beach. It was young love, it was quintessential summer, it was youth. My friend was telling me how it made her happy to see it and it also made her sad. I remember how I felt when my youngest son left home for an internship in Nashville, but I knew that he was leaving home for good. I wanted to tell her how I cried for a very long time after he left, that I know how she feels. But I didn’t say that.
“This week, I was feeling the pangs of missing my parents, especially my mom. It just hits me sometimes out of nowhere,” she said.
“Want to come over for dinner this week?” I said. “Come on Thursday. I will cook for you and you can sleep over.”
“Yay, that sounds amazing,” she said.
Pretty soon it will be fall and we’ll all be back to business again. But not yet. We still have August, and in honor of the waning summer, I will leave you with the most beautiful poem I have read all year.
Valentina Gnup WE SPEAK OF AUGUST Alone in my kitchen, I copy a chicken salad recipe from a Woman’s Day magazine and plan tomorrow night’s dinner. We don’t know what will happen between one raindrop and the next, yet we speak of August as if it were a contract, a promise the sky made. When I was twenty-five I married a drummer and silenced him with disapproval. Now I’m married to a poet— he reads poems on the porch and pets my head like a puppy. My daughters grew tall as honeysuckle and left— they took their soft skin, their buttermilk biscuit smell, the endless hungers that organized my days. My domain has shrunk to the narrow bone of my ankle. I did what was asked. I did what I feared. Like every woman I have ever known, I became my mother. I stroll through the rows of houses and yards; above me a skein of geese break in and out of formation— fluid as laundry on a line. Other women are out walking their dogs, murmuring to the mothers inside their heads. In the eastern sky the first star is out, preparing for the long night of wishes. At dusk every flower looks blue.
Thanks for sharing this all ... including that beautiful poem. It hit me in the feels today. xo!