...hotter than most, but like every summer for the last few years, it was here until it wasn’t.
I think of the endings of all the summers I’ve known. I see dates like August 28th and 29th and remember those used to be my first days of school in South Carolina, long ago and far away, when such things mattered.
Autumn used to be my favorite season for all the usual reasons, but primarily because I grew up in the Deep South where it was unbearably hot June through August before it became tolerably hot in September. As a man passing from the autumn of his own life into winter, I feel the inherent sadness of the season now. The green shoots of spring are dry twigs. The hollyhocks and asters have died back. We get a week, maybe two weeks of spectacular color in the trees before the windstorms that herald the changing seasons in the mountains rip the leaves away. Then it’s the naked black bones of trunks and limbs before an empty sky until sometime in May.
I wonder at the lesson in trees that are in full leaf for all of five months at best, less than one-half of a year. The rest of the time they sleep. “Life finds a way,” even if it has to play dead seven months out of the year. That’s life in the high country.
I awoke into September as a pre-dawn thundershower knocked out the power for a little over a half-hour. Rain is always big news here where it is quite literally high and dry, so it’s an auspicious beginning. The chill in the early morning air is unmistakable. We’ll have a few warm days to come, but only a few, and soon they will be gone. Time to make a list of those pre-deep-freeze chores to do before work outside becomes as impractical as it is uncomfortable.
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