Scenes from the summer

I’m probably partial as all getout, but having an August birthday isn’t the only reason that I love this month.  As a kid I loved the combined feeling of savoring the last couple of days of summer while anticipating the start of a whole new school year.  I loved that school started when it was still hot enough to break a good sweat at recess and wear shorts (even though I was always itching to bust out the new digs as soon as the temperature took even a slight nose dive) and that when we got home there were still plenty of hours of sunlight left for playing after school.  I loved starting to daydream about my Halloween costume (still do, actually) while eating watermelon, and jumping in the lake by our house, and soaking in the hot buzz of the lingering summer.

As an adult I obviously don’t have a school year marking these rotations, but I still feel it.  The pleasant tension between holding on to the long sweltering days sizzling with hot walks on the weekends and lightening bugs in the evenings, contrasted with the promise of crispy cool Autumn tones and mornings that are going to be here before we know it.  Quite unlike the transition to spring, this is a time of year that I love and long for both sides of the coin, where even a drenched brow is a reminder that we are outside doing and living, but also where a scarf taunts with the promise of the nostalgic burrowing to come as the sun starts to dip earlier and earlier.

This is the time of year that I start to get a little worried that we won’t do everything we want to before the darkness starts to drive us inside, and so my little notes and emails to myself are chock full of to-do lists ranging from bike rides that I want to take before it gets too cold to yard work to remembering to go to a couple of great swimming holes outside of town.  These lists are much more awesome than my winter lists which have a kind of hollow hope-this-cheers-us feel to them, and so the word for August is: savor.

This baby deer and her mama are systematically making their way through my mom's peach trees, though they are very sweet greeters as we come down the driveway.

We’re savoring this last leg of summer, this feeling of more to come, this sticky, manic time of year.