It is that time of year when summer dies. Its arrival is announced as the nights grow cooler, draw in a little longer, and the songbirds cease their singing. The katydids stridulate their hot love songs in the trees at night. And that thick grass of autumn begin shooting out their first growth. And the dipping sun casts steeper and steeper angles. An autumnal feel seeps into all existence now and thoughts of the dying summer pervade my conscience.
A dead cat’s bones sit like macabre porcelain in a highway ditch. Perhaps just now independent of his maternal clan, this poor young tom met its demise at the wheels of a speeding car. Maybe he’d just now set out on a new world of adventure of his own, where there are no big toms to slap his face. But in that second he made contact with the car, all that potential life was wiped away, He rotted in the sun for a few days. The flies buzzed his hide. Then the maggots ate away its flesh, and now it is nothing more than the perfect skeleton, bleaching white as the summer sun begins its deep sinking.
The leaves on the hazelnut trees are turning. In a month, the red maples will have some leaves with orange tips.
The corn is ripe, and the harvest machines will be coming on soon. The raccoons will eat their late August repast. Their hides will bulge with corn-infused fat, and they will be ready for a winter full of trapping, baying hounds, and the wildness of mating season.
New times are coming. The feeling is subtle at first, but then it becomes overwhelming. The Age of Photosynthesis will soon give way to the bountiful harvest, the stark austerity of the December wood.
And each year, the cycle of the seasons is shorter and shorter. The days are the same length, but with each passing year, my perception is oddly distorted. And it is distorted in the way of speeding things up.
With each iteration of a year, I have noticed this cognitive distortion, and it is the odd reminder that life is precious but quite fleeting.
Our species lives decades, but the decades will run faster and faster, like a cheetah just launched upon a gazelle. The gazelle twists and turns, each second hoping to avoid that deadly acceleration.
I always have this morose feeling in August, which soon passes when the first truly crisp days of September come slipping in.
August is the dying time for summer. The children will soon be trundling back to the school houses. The buses will be motoring along country lanes. And when I was a child, I felt the deep sadness that my days of long sylvan excursions would be abruptly ended when the calendar announced August’s arrival.
I remember one day in late August, just before I returned for another year of undergrad. Goldie, the redoubtable working golden retriever, and Kizzy, the broad-chested beast of a demi-boxer, went for a long walk along the ridges. Goldie was then so-white faced that she took on the bearing of sage of dogs, while Kizzy was still young enough to look positively bestial.
In my own stupidity, I took a wrong turn down a game trail, and then, realizing my error, tried to work my way back to familiar ground. I found myself walking around in odd little circles. but then I realized I should look at the dogs and see what they knew. After all, they spent much of their time casting down game trails where we inferior bipeds dare not to travel.
A sensitive and intuitive dog, a Goldie sensed my loss of bearings, and she stared at my eyes. A coquettish grin passed her lips, and she bolted through a big stand of autumn olive. I followed her course as best I could, and within just a few yards of bushwhacking, I found that I was back on the main tram road out of the woods. And I wandered home with both of my woods dogs
Two winters later, Goldie began having seizures. A brain tumor was suspected, but nothing could be done, and the last month of her life, she was but a shell of herself. She was lost and staggering around on the lawn, and I remember back to that day when she found the woods trails better than I ever could.
The sun is dipping away, but it will return. But not after a season of bright leaves that ends with woodland all stark and naked and gray and then is replaced by a few months of driving snow and long warring spells between freeze and thaw.
Some day, the coursing of the years will catch up to me too. I will fall just as golden retrievers and alley cats and raccoons do. My elements will return to the cosmos which begat all this thing we call existence.
And the dying time of summer will come again and again until the sun finally ceases burning and churning away.
This time came before I was born, and it will continue after. I here but for a few decades to witness it. And feel this odd morose feeling that it’s dying and I wish that it were not.
And the same deep glowing angles that illuminate the gold in a sable German shepherd’s coat tell us of the death that is coming.
And of the new times that are on the way.
