Summer’s Ebb — A Send-Off

My petunias are leggy and I can’t keep up with the tomatoes piling up on my counter top — both sure signs that August has reached its twilight. We have a plethora of delicious green beans right now, delivered regularly by my brother Ben, who raps on our screen door and says, “Your friendly green grocer is here.” He and his wife Bev have a huge garden, the produce of which they share with all of us without hesitation. Family comforts. This is the age of perfect tomatoes, too — the only time of year that they taste so good and full of flavor. Everything is full of flavor, in fact. The apples are fat and juicy, as are the peaches. There are beets and carrots, melons and corn. The farmers’ market is positively flush with produce. Everywhere you look there are shiny onions and such green bell peppers, cherry tomatoes and beefy honeydews. This summer is dwindling, and it is the time of harvest — the best time for food of the whole year.

The skies of late summer are nearly too striking to be believed, blue and deep. The serenade of crickets’ scraping legs is constant now, morning to night, joined at dusk by the ratchet grind of the katydids. The cicadas’ buzz has lessened in recent days, going the way of August heat… dying away for another year. The ground has suffered some from that heat and the lack of a good soaking rain. Grass is wiry and brown in places, thirsty and spent. Looking up, one can see that leaves are growing tired of grasping their branches. They are beginning to curl with age, and some are even starting to lose their green. I am always dismayed to see those first leaves of color. The rapidity of that onset is jarring. Surely it’s not time for that! Ah, but it is. The planet keeps whirling even if we wish it would not go so fast.

Thus comes the melancholy of late summer. I wish I didn’t feel it, but I do. Summer is so brief here on the mountaintop. Brief and brilliant. I find myself silently pleading with these August days of warmth to please linger. I want to reject the idea that soon the whole ground will be littered with leaves spiked with yellow and gold. I don’t want the cicadas to stop buzzing. I don’t want the rain to turn cold or the perennials to die away just yet. Not yet.

My brain simply can’t let it go — I always end up equating the end of summer with the end of life. The parallels are elementary. Life coming to literal fruition, all things having pointed to that culmination of birth, growth, success…. and then the end. All to go to sleep and die off, silenced under a quilt of snow and ice, not to rise again for many months. And never to be the same. I hate saying goodbye. I dread those moments in life when we have to separate from that which we love. And it’s just inevitable, in all things. Sending our children off into the world. Saying goodbye to our cherished but short-lived pets. Reaching the end of a relationship. Keeping vigil at the side of a dying friend. If we risk anything at all, we always have to say goodbye. And sometimes I just don’t feel like it. Late August is one of those times.

But what if I didn’t have to say goodbye? What if the lazy days of August did stay? What if each day were brilliant with sunshine and that azure sky, what if the tomatoes just kept tomatoing, the beans just kept beaning? What if I could keep swimming in that soft 82-degree water of my mom’s pool every day, on and on? Never ending, always August. Yeah, that wouldn’t be great. My fickle heart would soon long for a change. I would grow wistful for autumn and all that beautiful death. Bright leaves, the blooms of September weed, the mums opening their spiky heads to say “happy fall, everyone.” I would yearn for the prospect of my three sons making the trek back home for the Autumn Glory Festival so that they, too, can see the brilliance, play some games, borrow a sweatshirt, light a fire on mom’s porch for a chilly evening of being together, and then say goodbye again.

If August were immortal, my soul would soon ache for those first few snowflakes, I know it. I would dream of that first sighting, that first squeal of “Hey, it’s snowing!” I would miss the evenings of companionship with John, together in our quiet living room, a fire crackling away and some familiar TV show playing as the wind whips around our house, sculpting drifts and forcing the mercury to lie low. I would miss it. I would miss that poignant silence of a deep snow, when all is still. And soon I would obsess about spring. I would crave that time of melting, when rivulets fly down the hillsides, crafting pathways in the dying snow. I would so want to detect the scent of dirt under the ice, ever emerging despite any late, wet snowfall — a swan song of winter as it, too, gives way and says goodbye. If August stayed, how would I celebrate the pointy heads of my Ice Follies daffodils that strive toward the sunshine so early in the spring? How would I experience that promise of blooms to come, flowers to burst open, and the full yellow sunshine to warm my whole skin? It would already be there, and I would have grown to loathe it.

So I suppose I will have to say goodbye, as much as I don’t want to. We always have to, and the moment of separation is bitter. There’s no getting around it. We must pay for our joy, our love, and our comfort. We pay with grief. It is often a steep price, keenly felt at the time of payment. I have not been battered so much in life that I don’t feel the investment is worth it, thankfully. So far I think it is usually a fair trade, difficult as it may be.

For now, though, I will savor these senior summer days. They are still here, after all. The calendar says fall doesn’t commence until Sept. 22, so that gives me nearly four good weeks of sun and swimming, tomatoes tasty and fat, and those last brilliant blooms. I will take it all, saving my goodbye for the last possible moment.

Onward we all go.