And So It Begins . . . Again

Make no mistake: it's still summer.

Despite the unusually cool temperatures. (Who's complaining? Not I. The air conditioning turned off for the first time in ages. Even the cats, cold last night due to open windows, cuddled me, willingly.)

Despite the pouring rain. (Usually we're still in something like a drought. Who's complaining? Not I. No watering of the newish shrubs for a while now. No need.)

However.

The odonates are not fans of the cool temps and rain.

And I, free to admit since I am not employed by the college, am not celebrating the return of students to an otherwise quiet community.

Today, after waiting more than five minutes just to get onto University Avenue, after nearly hitting two students who walked right out in front of my moving without ever looking, after weaving through hordes of them Friday night, I felt an urge to push that button.

But.

I didn't.

A Trio of Annual Pleasures

1.
Mr. King's heirloom tomatoes (among them Cherokee Purple, Chocolate, Pink, Brandywine [not ready yet], White). Today's haul? Chocolate, Pink, and Cherokee Purple.

My father grew tomatoes in my childhood, snapped them off the vine, brushed them against his jumpsuit, bit into flesh, wiping the juice with a red bandanna, always stored in a back pocket. 

Then, I did not like tomatoes: they were bitter like lemons and oranges. Now, I love heirlooms, mostly the locally ones I can buy for just a few weeks. These are worth the wait.

2.
Cicadas leave their spent selves (shed skins called exuviae) hanging on trees, stems, gate and deck posts, after emerging into their adult selves, not unlike the odonates I stalk. This summer, I've seen their exuviae, and I've enjoyed cicada choruses. Today, I saw my season's first actual insect, clinging to my deck post, just as the storm blackened the forest beyond. Like emerald fire, his greenness burned.

3.
The predicted storm rode in on a few isolated plops, then staccato patters, and finally drum snaps, accompanied by wind, but none of it threatening, the kind of afternoon storm that reminds me of childhood naps at home or camp and invites a comfy chair, cats, and a beautiful novel. I gave up a Tim O'Brien reading for Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, a book so beautiful that I have saved the last chapter, to savor later, maybe even tomorrow.

4.
Tomatoes, rainstorms, literary enchantment converge in one perfect summer afternoon.

If every day ended with bells

I'd be a happy person.

Bells and woods.

After summer rain.

Old Friends

sure signs of summer: 

bluebird training in the back yard

Hackberry Emperor visiting the screen door

first appearance of the Autumn Meadowhawk

Sometimes Even I Have No Words

Who Cares about Shelf Life?

When I picked up my CSA about 24 hours ago, I squealed on seeing the cantaloupe.

"It's got no shelf life," Michael said. "So I can't sell them through the market."

"I don't care! It'll be gone by tomorrow night!"

"It's a baby . . .," he added, but my mind was already blank. I didn't hear the something-or-other kind of baby: I was already holding and smelling the small melon.

Surely, one of the orangest and muskiest cantaloupes I've ever eaten, tasting like summer -- sweet and sweaty, delicious and mildly disturbing in its earthiness, tasting of mold and rot and vigor.


Good thing my mother taught me to clean my plate since it wouldn't have kept anyway.

Raspberries Taste Like Roanoke Summers in Childhood

The Children
by Mark Jarman

The children are hiding among the raspberry canes.
They look big to one another, the garden small.
Already in their mouths this soft fruit
That lasts so briefly in the supermarket
Tastes like the past. The gritty wall,
Behind the veil of leaves, is hollow.
There are yellow wasps inside it. The children know.
They know the wall is hard, although it hums.
They know a lot and will not forget it soon.

When did we forget? But we were never
Children, never found where they were hiding
And hid with them, never followed
The wasp down into its nest
With a fingertip that still tingles.
We lie in bed at night, thinking about
The future, always the future, always forgetting
That it will be the past, hard and hollow,
Veiled and humming, soon enough.

Other Ways of Seeing

Hunkering sometimes affords another way of seeing: onto a field of light and into dark woods beyond, uphill, through grass and weed, a pair of mating Banded Pennants sways and turns in the breeze.

A bumblebee flies at them, and they disappear.

I hear the final buzzing of summer, I see the cardinal flowers and Autumn Meadowhawks, I know the inevitable slow approach of a season's end, and I already mourn its loss.

Robley's Spot

The first of August, so cool that summer seems over. But even now, in early morning, with low light broken once by sun and fish-scale clouds, even now Odonates gather to warm up.

As do I.

Taste of Summer

fat
hairy
seedy
blackberries
still wet
with afternoon rain

Summer's Pleasures

Pink tastes like cotton candy, too sweetly sticky on the tongue, teeth rattling, hanging on for balance, like the flower flies and bees plumbing every blossom.

A Visitor at My Door

A single yellow jacket died and nose-dived into a pucker of my deck doormat.

All summer long, hundreds (if not thousands) of yellow jackets nested in holes in the ground and wood planks and under rocks all along Lake Cheston's shore. At the dam, I knew every nesting site and simply avoided stepping into or stabbing my walking pole into one. The yellow jackets didn't bother me because I respected their space and they respected mine.

I confess to a peculiar summer pleasure: I enjoyed standing just above one or more of their nests in morning. When the air warmed and sun shone, they burst out like shooting stars, rat-a-tat, so fast and so many they made a yellow stream pouring out of darkness into light.

I found this fellow in mid-afternoon. By morning, it was gone, perhaps providing someone's meal or snack overnight. I missed him when I opened the door: he reminded me of so many happy days at the lake, and of the summer now -- like him -- gone.

Definition

To know the word
plump
find a tomato vine
hung with ripe
ripening fruit
like pendant coral
gems of the garden
sweet, tart, juiced
lift the limb
palm one tomato
careful not to
break its hold
thumb the skin
roll the weight
and know summer