Change is underway. July ends its run as August arrives to carry us through the final full month of summer.
The air is beginning to take on late summer’s faint-but-distinctive musty scent, and there’s a dusty, faded look to things, as if efforts during the previous months have left August a little wilted and shopworn.
Not only is summer’s seasonal timespan growing shorter, but its daily allotment of light keeps diminishing. We’ve already lost almost a full hour of precious daylight since June’s passing solstice—and by the time August has run its course, we’ll be down an additional 76 minutes—giving up more than two hours since that event!
Time keeps ticking and the earth keeps tilting, and whirling as it hustles along its celestial pathway!
At a cursory glance, you might conclude August to be merely an extension of July—simply more of the same. And it’s true, this last full summer month is not superficially much different than its predecessor.
Temperature averages are comparable, humidity and rainfall, while usually less, are still analogous.
If asked to point to specifics, I might be prone to hem and haw and mumble about something in the air, about the way the hickories are starting to turn rusty. Or grumble because the dwindling daylight means it’s darker when I take the dog out for her morning constitutional.
Yet August, with its brassy hot days and sultry nights, seems somehow infused with an almost indefinable sense of time’s certain passage.
As daylight time gets trimmed from our mornings and evenings, waning sunlight signals plants to begin wrapping things up for another season—nudging them to start the transition from growth mode to ripening maturity.
There’s an unmistakable look to August—an appearance not quite of fatigue, but of dwindling energy as the job of bringing in the season nears completion.
August is not summer’s end, but it’s certainly a month on the downhill slope. Any outdoor observer with a keen eye will have little difficulty noticing the subtle changes.
Typically, August delivers less rain than July. If that’s again the case, our local streams will soon begin to languish, diminishing in this last blast of evaporative heat. Pools will shrink and lie motionless, barely stirred with only the vaguest current. Riffles will narrow and slow, their babble reduced to a sibilant whisper.
Ponds and shallow lakes will show more of their muddy edges. Metallic green and turquoise dragonflies will prowl the border’s maze of exposed cattails, sifting the air above for mealtime mosquitoes.
Come August, white billows of Queen Anne’s Lace rule wayside fields, their aristocracy affirmed by the year’s first spattered clumps of royal purple ironweed.
August has its own genuine rewards, just as it sets its own unique tone—including tasty treasures. Luscious, sun-ripened blackberries, and “lost” heritage-variety apples found at old homesites—homes now long gone except for a few blocks of cut limestone and a rotten timber or two in the weeds.
The heat of midday often lacks both birdsong and breeze. Only the cicada’s shrill, pulsating call jars the drowsy silence.
“There’s somethin’ in the August air that makes a feller lazy,” noted one bucolic poet.
How true. And the best excuse I have for regularly stretching out flat on my back in the soft grass of a comfortable meadow. Moreover, I encourage you to give this supine viewpoint a try.
If you can manage to not drift off in an inadvertent snooze, it provides a wonderful angle for watching a redtail hawk drift in high spirals overhead, as flocks of fluffy white clouds graze slowly across their blue-sky pasture.
When August’s heat gets you down, and a midday ramble isn’t within your comfort zone, do your seasonal savoring once the sun sets. Even then, if the day has been oppressively hot, the evening’s amphibian melodies may be reduced to those basso harrumpings from the occasional granddaddy bullfrogs who still insist on serenading the moon and stars, regardless of ambient air temperature.
Before we moved to this old stone cottage perched on the riverbank’s edge, with its adjacent riffle and pool a few yards away—I regularly spent many a pleasant August evening parked on some country road pull-off close to a stream. Relaxing on the pickup’s tailgate, I’d watch as twilight turned the sky from pink to orange to purple, while swallows made their final foraging passes over the nearby water.
Sometimes a couple of nighthawks would appear and join in—birds my grandfather called “bullbats”—swooping and roaring as they executed steep aerial dives.
Later on, real bats—flying mammals—would join the hunt. I’d hear fluttering wingbeats overhead, stare into the crepuscular dark, and observe their amazing meal-foraging chases. Fast-flying sorties—twisting, speeding, power-diving exhibitions that were simply breathtaking. A delightful performance amid the crepuscular gloaming.
Now, of course, I can walk out the front door, take a step or two, and see the very same show from the convenience of my own front yard!
Should I linger, I might hear the shivery questioning of a barred owl calling from the riparian woods along the stream. If I’m really lucky, I infrequently catch the namesake call of a whippoorwill enjoying himself in endless repetition.
Crickets chirp and stridulate. And sooner or later as the month progresses, I can bet on hearing the summer’s first katydid—a sure seasonal prophet.
Too, there have been magical moments, when it is late at night and the whole world is hushed, already asleep. A palpable quiet prevails as I accompany the dog out for her final, pre-bedtime stroll.
A Full Sturgeon moon is just rising above the hill to the east. Pale light floods the yard and glints off the flowing river. And I swear…I can hear a sibilant scraping as that ancient silver orb slides upward into August’s starry sky.
Perhaps the old saying is true—that if we listen close enough we can indeed hear the music of the spheres. Or maybe that’s just the sound of another summer drifting down time’s eternal river.
Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].
