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Category: seasons

Shhh!

Shhh!

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The groundhog has spoken: We’ll have six more weeks of winter. Which is why I’m doing a lot of shushing these days.

I walk out the front door and hear the birds, their songs sounding suspiciously springlike. I feel the warmth of the sun even as I shiver in my down coat, hat and gloves. I check around the big tree. Good! No signs of life.

Shhhh! I say to the still-dormant earth. Sleep some more, I whisper to the tender shoots-to-be. I feel about them as I did my children as babies, when I would tip-toe to the door to find them still napping.

Sleep tight, daffodil shoots and dogwood buds. The world is not ready for you — and you are not ready for the world.

Winter Lite

Winter Lite

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This morning, a brisk wind rattled the Christmas lights and banged them against the side of the house. Their rat-a-tat-tat was an errant percussion to the howling west wind. “Haven’t you heard?” they seemed to be saying, “it’s winter.”

Yeah, we’ve heard. It’s a little early, though, don’t you think? We’re not supposed to be this cold till January.

I liked yesterday’s upper 40s. A seasonable tang in the air, but still warm enough to bounce on the trampoline after dark.

In other words, I prefer winter lite. Just right for caroling, shopping and running holiday errands — but no single-digit wind chills, thank you very much!

The Ploy

The Ploy

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It’s a trick, this time change thing. In the fall we’re lured with the extra hour. Oh, it will be good to sleep in, we tell ourselves. And who can’t use a little more sleep?

In reality, it’s just a ploy to take our eyes off the ball — the ball being how little light there is to go around this time of year.  For everyone who rejoices at the lighter mornings, there are those who decry the darker afternoons.

Yesterday, as a golden day gave way to a lowered-sun afternoon, the reality of it all hit me. It would be darkness at 5. And the sun that slanted so fetchingly through the trees would dip out of sight long before I was ready for it to.

It’s just the way the world turns, I know. But that doesn’t mean I can’t complain about it!

Smells Like Fall

Smells Like Fall

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A headline in the paper yesterday: Feels like summer, smells like fall. Exactly! Trees are yellowing and thinning. Leaves are piling up, collecting in gullies and storm drains. Mums are in their glory.

But all of this is happening (yes!) in 80-degree temps. The evenings have been chilly enough to set the trees on fire, but days are warm and mellow. It couldn’t be better for someone who longs for summer temperatures all year long.

Meanwhile, that lovely aroma, the acrid smell of autumn, is in the air and on the tongue. These are days you wish would last. The color and the light, each day a drop of butterscotch or honey.

September’s Shoulder Season

September’s Shoulder Season

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There’s dried brush along the road now, and sometimes a single red or yellow leaf floats slowly down to lodge on the dry brown lawns.

I wouldn’t mind a few more months of 90-degree temps — but I’m in the minority. For many, for most, summer has outstayed its welcome. People long for a little nip in the air, for crisp autumn leaves and brisk autumn breezes.

What we have now is the delicious in-between. Not quite summer, not quite fall. I remember once reading a little essay about this time of year in the New York Times. I’ve since looked for that piece but been unable to find it.

But what it said, with far more grace than I can muster this morning, is that these are charmed weeks: all the energy of a new year within the frame of September’s mellow beauty and equanimity. A shoulder season, a fleeting patch of loveliness and ease.

Summer, Still

Summer, Still

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These are the bonus days of summer. Every warm afternoon, every sliver moon peeping through the trees as it rises in the sultry August sky. Every thin crescent moon that sees us through till morning.

Summer has been hot this year, and I haven’t minded. It’s warmed my bones, and if it keeps warming them a few more weeks, I won’t complain.

It hasn’t been the most relaxing summer. Creating a backyard wedding venue has taken care of that. But it has been rich in people and in feeling and will not be easily forgotten.

The day lilies are drooping now, the cone flowers are fading. There are a dozen mum plants cooling their heels in the house. They’ll be planted when the temperature dips below 90.

Until then, until next Tuesday for sure, it is still gloriously, indisputably … summer.

Wood Smoke

Wood Smoke

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I took a walk last night as the light was fading, the smell of wood smoke in the air. At first I thought I was imagining it. The acrid scent went along well with the slight nip in the air. Was it real? Or was I was so accustomed to the two together that I made it up.

But no, there actually was wood smoke in the air. Neighbors were burning brush in their fire pit — something frowned upon by the home owners association, though you won’t catch me telling.

The smell of wood smoke is the aroma of autumn. The only scent more autumnal is the smell of tobacco wafting from the drying barns on Angliana Avenue in Lexington. Barns that have been gone for decades, I believe, along with the tobacco that used to fill them.

Still, wood smoke is an evocative aroma, and one I was happy to get a whiff of last night. It was calming, redolent of campfires and coziness not danger and destruction.

Triple Digit

Triple Digit

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After three triple-digit temperature days in a row (that’s real temperature, not heat index, which was more like 110), we’re having a cold snap today (“only” 95).

I know I should hate it, should be hunkering down indoors with a cool drink and the AC ratcheted to 72, but it’s summer, after all, and I think about how cold our winters have been lately and how really, truly, sweatily alive I feel when pulling weeds in a buggy backyard with the sun beating down on my back.

Weird, to be true, but something I dream about when the cold winds blow. Which they will … soon enough.

(What’s blowing these grasses isn’t a cold wind but a hot breeze.)

Happy Jeweleye

Happy Jeweleye

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A jewel of a day to many would be one with pleasant temps and low humidity, a puffy-cloud, blue-sky day. Today is not like that. It is muggy and hot. The insects are singing their fevered chorus and the birds are chirping listlessly in the background.

But to me it’s a jewel of a July day. Perfect in its very July-ness. Yes, there are heat warnings. But this is summer: It’s supposed to be hot.  And yes, we move more slowly now, but isn’t that one of summer’s great gifts, that it’s andante instead of allegro?

So here’s to summer, to the heat and humidity, even the torpor. Happy Jeweleye!

A Summer in Moments

A Summer in Moments

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This morning I caught a glimpse of two birds in flight. It was impossible to know their type, only that they were silvered on the wing and had a radiance most possible when the sun is low in the sky.

Here we are in high summer, a summer of discontent and national tragedies, a summer when it’s easy to feel befuddled and confused. There’s hardly time to absorb one reality before another asserts itself.

For me, summer has always been a time of healing. It must go back to long-ago school vacations. Summer was a time when we could get back to ourselves. Long books, late nights, deep pools — of water and of thought.

Now summer is over in the blink of an eye. It must exist in moments. Biting into the season’s first peach. Feeling warm sand between the toes. Watching late light slant through the poplars. Or seeing two birds in flight, with silver on their wings.