Canis lupus hominis

Miley on an August rain walk.

Summer is dying.  The long days of June and July have given way to these shortening days of August. The evening shadows come looming in much earlier now than they did a month ago. The long slide into darkness.

The birds have stopped their singing, for the male songbirds have given up their territories. They no longer singing to proclaim stretch of forest theirs. They no longer try to impress the fairer sex. They have no chicks to feed.

All that’s to be done now is to eat the wild fruit and prepare for either a long migration to the sun-soaked tropics or a long stay in the land of snow and blackness. They are among the last surviving heirs of lineage that once shook the earth with their mighty footsteps and ponderous girth some 65 million years ago,  but now are forced to live a more fleeting existence on the wing.

With no birds singing, the humid air is cut with the stridulations of crickets and monotonous cadence of katydids.  When the sun hits the trees just right, the dog day cicadas let loose their whirring hisses.

The autumn olive bushes are filled with berries, and the oaks are laden with acorns. The nuts start to fall from hickory trees, and the ravening gray squirrels, so covetous of a fine hickory nut repast, start cutting the green nuts from the trees.

All signs point the death of summer and the rise of autumn.  Autumn is nothing more than a harbinger of the season of cold and blackness.

The truth is I hate this time of year. I always have. I think it’s because I associate with the time I hated most as a kid: the begin of new school year.

It’s not that I hated school– at least not the academic aspects of it. What I hated was the social aspects of it all. I would go from a world of my own natural history explorations and good books to a world obsessed with order and obsessed with football

August has never been a happy time for me. It’s even worse for me because I lost my grandpa two years ago on a shortening August day like this one. The morning he passed, I went to the woods and walked among the falling dew.

This is the time of dew falling on the broomgrass and of red maples letting their first leaves fall to the forest floor. This is the time of the first harvest and the first country festivals.

Soon the shotguns will be blasting at doves and squirrels, then the arrows will be let flying into the deer’s hides. Then, in the bleakness of November, the rifles will be brought out and the great cull of the white-tails begins. It is the climax of autumn as it finally sinks into December darkness.

August merely announces the arrival of these times of harvest. The harvest time was a time to put away for the winter, Preserve it by canning or drying. Preserve it the best you can, for winter is a time when nothing grows.  That which grew in the June and July sun must be saved for a time when the weak beams of the December and January sun cast a sallow glow upon the skeletons of tree trunks.

It is time to say goodbye to the summer. Maybe bask a bit in its requiem.

Maybe try to preserve in the mind those long June days that seem so perfectly eternal that it seems illogical that they’ll ever end.

But they are now.

Summer is dying in the August dews and in the cacophony of hissing insects.

Not long for this world.

But it will return– someday.

I let the August rain rush down my back, and I am finally peace with it.

Goodbye, oh lush summer! You’ve brought me cheer. I wish that you could stay a little longer, just one more sun-kissed day, another gentle rain, just one more evening with fawns leaping about in the meadows.

But you must go. The seasons have changed here since long before there was ever such a thing as life gracing the planet. Life has evolved with seasons of sun and gloom, of lushness and starkness, and of the smorgasbord and famine.

But just because it has always been this way doesn’t mean I don’t lament your passing.

Lamentation does not require an excuse or reason.

It is simply sadness let loose because it can’t be held back anymore.

Now, indulge me my sorrow, and we’ll get onto weightier matters.