Late Summer

 I never sleep particularly well in August.  I first noticed this eight years ago when we adopted Tuck and Lyra in early September and I suddenly began to sleep better.  I thought it was these two remarkable kittens.  But the bad sleeping came back the next year and is just part of the August landscape for me.  What is it? I wondered.  This year, as I was on an unforgiving program of walking for my health--unforgiving in the sense that there is no cheating--I decided to look and listen more carefully, particularly as I walked the bank of Wascana Creek, where I can get more clues from nature in its wilder state.  (That was before the goats came and ate nature in its wild state.  I sure hope the City knew what it was doing and that the wild roses and the wolf willow return in the spring.  The goats, though, were charming.  I'm not blaming the goats.) 

The first thing I noticed was that the leaves get....thicker.  Does that make sense?  Do they just get dryer and less flexible?  In the early summer, when I sit under the crab apple tree in my yard, I can see where higher leaves cast shadows on lower leaves, which are thin enough to darken.  I noticed the change this year first in the aspens, who for much of the summer make the sound of rain on leaves when the wind moves through them.  Now they sound more like a polite smattering of applause, say sometime in the third act of a play when an actor nails a line and a few people in the audience realize they've been handed the clue to the play.

In my back yard, where I have a thicket of trees, in August an entire flock of sparrows can disappear into the leaves almost completely when my cats show up in the window to watch them.  You only know they are there because a leaf or two might be moving. Watching this carefully, I could see that the leaves are subtly different colours, not the overall of young green.  They absorb the tawny sparrows more easily.

There are, of course, late summer sounds, the drone of cicadas and the pulse of crickets.  There is a place near the Cameron Street Bridge where the cicadas made a dome of sound as I walked along the path.  I was enwrapped in something foreign, something out of another time.

On heavy, hot days, the creek bank almost smells of baking, as if the grasses are giving off a ripe scent.  Perennial gardens are nearly done, except for the odd sunflower or bursts of false sunflower, as if we need some extra light right about now. Or as if they are imitating the golden light of August. Seed pods are everywhere, as if the plants are looking backwards and forwards, both.  Back to the time they flowered and took in enough energy to make seeds and forward to next year.  

Then there are the dragon flies.  There are over 3,000 kinds of dragon flies, and they're found on every continent except Antarctica.  One August I was listening to Krista Tippett's "On Being" podcast when she used a word in the wrong way--which of course made me pay attention.  "You feel a sense of overwhelm," she said.  I immediately told her that "overwhelm" was a verb, though of course she didn't hear me, but then her guest used it and I checked Google, and sure enough, "overwhelm" has become a noun describing the emotional experience of life being just too much. "That's it!" I thought.  That's the sadness I feel about August even while I'm steeped in its beauty.  The two things happen very much at once.  I'm overwhelmed by a moment's beauty in the same instant that I'm aware of that beauty's and that moment's mortality.  It's there in the changing texture of leaves, in the seed pods.  It's in the light, which flares out in wild sunsets and then suddenly turns secretive toward the end of my walk.  

When I was--yes--overwhelmed by this experience of doubleness one year, my therapist asked me to choose something animate I could talk to about these feelings, to explore them.  I choose, almost as an August totem, a dragonfly.  Their eyes have 30,000 facets that allow them to see in ultra-colour, and they can see 360 degrees--before and behind them.  That's how they manage to so skillfully begin to suddenly shoot backwards.  On Wascana Creek, there are red and blue and ochre and brown dragonflies, all different sizes, and each year they give me a chance to think a little bit more deeply about complexity and contradiction. Late August and early September are on the cusp of something, on the cusp of change, in that uncomfortable no-man's-land of being two places at once. Seeing so much brings a sense of overwhelm, but you can't ignore its richness.  Seeing what's before you but always keeping part of your mind attending to what's behind stretches your very way of thinking about time.  But on long walks in late August and early September, in the dusky golden air, that's what is in season.