Empty Hammock

August is the fastest month. Three weeks feels like three days. It’s supposed to be a month that flows like honey and molasses and maple syrup; the hours are supposed to have that kind of texture and consistency. Languid. Warm. Unending. Listless, even.

Instead the whole month feels a bit like a ride on an old-fashioned Tilt-A-Whirl, swirling wildly round and round in a blur of red basket and dizzy with visitors, unread books, things left undone. And now there are crickets and tree frogs jammering away in the earlier twilights and there are tomatoes weighing heavy in the backyard gardens and pots of asters and mums lining the entrance to the supermarket and suddenly I want to wear heavy shoes and plaid skirts.

September looms with its fresh, blue mornings and brisk, starched attitudes. Indolence is frowned upon. Beach paperbacks lined with sand are left to yellow in faded canvas bags and though the rose of sharon blooms the maples wither. A leaf from a chestnut tree falls on Main Street. All too soon.

And that’s why next year, I plan on living August the way it’s meant to be lived. Sleeping late on sultry mornings and eating tomatoes in open fields and buttering up that ear of corn and reading on the porch until the stars come out. I’m going to swim more and take an outdoor shower now and then and let the tiny spiders spin away in the corners and go to fairs and concerts and maybe even to a spangly, tacky t-shirt store with the rest of the tourists who flock here, living summer consciously the way vacationers do.

There are still a few August days left, and where I live, September has lovely summer-feeling days. But the mood is not as lighthearted and shadows fall faster and darker on the lawns and one by one, the lights go out in the big summer houses. We are left with memories of traffic and parades, of weddings in side yards, the fragrance of fried clams and wilted roses, the longing for a time when summer stretched out like Dorothy’s yellow brick road all the way to the wild, blueberry moon and all the way back again.