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Category: seasons

Light After Dinner

Light After Dinner

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Last night I sat on the deck after dinner watching the daylight drain away. The air was
full of moisture and I followed the bats as they darted through the air. They were invisible until they crossed a patch of still-blue sky. 
The wind picked up, moving
the tallest oak branches. They might be palms waving in a tropical
breeze, the fringed opening to an underwater cave, guardians of heaven.
As I sat there, the sky darkened and a faint star blinked
beyond the blue. Frogs sang and lightning bugs danced ever higher in the sky.
It was after 9 but I didn’t want to go inside. 
On nights like these it’s easy to believe that summer will never end, that it will always be light after dinner, that there will always be more time. None of it true, of course. But lovely to believe just the same. 
It’s Back!

It’s Back!

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You forget what it’s like. The feeling of moving slowly through the atmosphere, pushing it aside, clouds of moisture.

You forget what it does to your hair. How all attempts at order and smoothness are in vain.

You forget how it warms and comforts you, this steam bath that we move through most summer days.  And the muggy nights, so full of ache and promise.

For the last weeks we’ve lived in a dream: cool nights, warm days, sweaters after the sun goes down. But something was missing.

The humidity is back. Summer is here.

Busting Out

Busting Out

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It’s what June is doing. What the song celebrates. What you can feel in the morning air, the promise of warmth but not humidity.

The hydrangeas that were thinking about blooming in April and beginning to leaf in May are finally getting serious now.

Tomatoes and herbs are planted, annuals are potted. And the climbing rose is showing its stuff.

I can live with this. 

Holly Blossom Time

Holly Blossom Time

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I drive with the windows down now. Not just because I like the wind in my face but also because the air smells like honeysuckle and holly blossom.

The former is a well known harbinger of summer; the latter has taken me a while to recognize. It is subtle and tender, not as overpowering as honeysuckle but just as redolent of warm weather and freedom.

Here is the holly flower, blurry and slightly past peak. A blossom hidden under the canopy of this prickly, upright tree.

We think of the holly around the holidays but it’s just as important now, when it sweetens the air with its scent.

Catching My Breath

Catching My Breath

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So begins a long holiday weekend, last hurrah of the school year and opening salvo of summer. It is a delicious morning. Scrumptious. Meant to be eaten with a spoon. Or no, with a fork, slowly. Not slurped or inhaled but consumed mindfully.

On a go-to-office morning I would be encased in glass and masonry by now, shut off from the elements. All head, no heart. But today I’m at home, windows open, air flowing through the house. Birds outside, birds inside. Music everywhere.

Time for a long exhale. Very long. Then another, and another. The long winter is over. Time to catch my breath.

The Child in Spring

The Child in Spring

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“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”      —  George Eliot

I often think of these words, especially this time of year. In mid-May, childhood runs rampant. Kids frolic at the bus stop, forgo homework to dash outside the minute they get home from school. After dinner they ride bikes and scooters around the cul-de-sac. The end of the school year dangles tantalizingly in the future. It won’t be long now.

I caught this excitement the other day on a walk through the neighborhood. I inhaled it in the aroma of cut grass, felt it in the sun on my face. So many memories as I amble. Not even memories, but deeper than that. Sensory impressions. A whiff of juniper. The musty odor of a storm drain.

We forget how close to the ground we were in those days, how the earth rose up to meet us then with all its sounds and scents. But because it did, I can stroll through the world now with my middle-aged self — and the whole world comes alive again.

A Fluff Piece

A Fluff Piece

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For the last few days cottonwood fluff has been floating through the air. I think I know the source, a tree that’s half a block or so away. But every year at this time when the wind is right and the air is clear, I see its progeny.

So light, so fragile, yet tenacious enough to go the distance, it lodges itself in driveway cracks, leaf piles and sometimes even on the ground. It’s hard not to see it as wishes spun from the spring air, spores of hope.

I read about the tree, learn that it’s a type of poplar that does well in stressed soil. It became the official state tree of Kansas in 1937, the state legislature dubbing it “the pioneer of the prairie.”

Funny then to see it cast its seeds out onto the tidy, mulched lawns of suburbia. Perhaps we are the final frontier.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Grow Up

Grow Up

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Trees do it. Flowers do it. Even exasperating toddlers do it. But at this time of year it’s hard not to be thrilled by the sheer verticality of the green and growing world.

The climbing rose is a case in point. It grows up and out. Or over and out, depending upon how you look at it. And you’ll have to take my word for it, because this picture doesn’t capture it.

The point is, the branches grow out so the roses can grow up. Such is the power of the sun, of the life force.

May Day?

May Day?

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Here we are at May Day — sodden, squishy, water-logged. The petals of our dogwood, our Kwanzan cherries, scattered and beaten to the ground. Our airy forget-me-nots hardly the azure clouds they were three days ago. The azaleas hesitant, unwilling to bloom.

After this winter, I’d hoped for a knock-’em-dead spring. Something to warm and delight us. But nature doesn’t operate like that, I tell myself. Rain pelts and puddles — or fails to fall at all. Winds  funnel and destroy. Sometimes, snow even falls in spring.

The balance we seek, the recompense, is not in the natural world. If it is to be, we must supply it.