August

Sirius, the dog star, rises before dawn. So the dog days of summer are here. Charlie understands. He’ll happily play fetch in the morning when he can take breaks on his tummy in the cool grass. He’ll walk down to the mailbox with me even in the heat of the day, but he comes back up the hill panting, ready for the water bowl. He sleeps a lot, but he’s no match for Hazel Tov who sleeps nearly all day, She’s active in the cool night, hunting and occasionally racing across the bed waking all of us. It’s a good time of year to be nocturnal.

August is slipping down quickly towards my birthday, Tomorrow is the anniversary Joe and I shared so happily with Barbara and Jerry for 11 years. Happy anniversary, Augusts. Then there is Joe’s birthday, and then mine – and then summer is virtually over. The goldenrod is in bloom, and we’re seeing more and more tent caterpillar nests. We’ve started eating the tomatoes and zucchini I planted, and the lovely fresh herbs. I picked some beautiful fresh parsley the other day and was mildly annoyed to find it covered in what appeared to be tiny black and yellow worms. They were a pain to wash off, clinging tightly to the curly parsley leaves and hiding in the crevices. But today, Margaret Renkl, who writes so beautifully in the Times about nature, enlightened me. They were almost certainly the infant caterpillars who, had I not drowned them, would have grown to metamorphose into swallow tail butterflies. It did make me feel a little bad about my callous murder, but mostly I was delighted to learn what they were, to go from ignorance to knowing in just a couple of days, and with so little effort.

I so often think of my mother in Amenia, with her bookshelf of flower guides and guides to mushrooms, trees, reptiles, and pretty much anything that lived. She was a patient a voracious student, sitting under the gas lamp late into the night working to identify the day’s finds. She would share the discoveries with us proudly the next morning, the puzzles she had solved. But I doubt she got much more than a brief, oh cool, from us, and Dad probably didn’t even lower the Times to see her smiling over the knowledge she had acquired. In later years, we all paid more attention, even Dad learned a few plants and birds. She was the queen of learning in my childhood, and now I think of her every time I learn something about the natural world I live in.

Mom hated these hot muggy days of August, and we spent much of them immersed in the lake. Jay and I often remark in these Covid19 days on how incredibly lucky we are to be living up here on our hill with so little to worry about other than family and friends who are in more crowded places. And we are lucky. But the big luck in my life was choosing my parents so well. In their own, quite different ways, they taught me the joy of learning, of coming to know what a thing is – not just an annoying bug, but a butterfly to be. My day changes when I learn something like that. I am so blessed to have developed the habits of learning as a little kid, and doubly blessed to have lived in a place where there was so much to learn, although I suppose that describes everywhere on the planet.

It’s a joy to have come back to this country where the unspooling of the seasons is so familiar. I watch the goslings, now geese, nearly as big as their parents, practicing their flying and feasting on the grubs and tender plants on the lawn. They know what’s coming, and so do I. It will be time for them to fly south, and they are preparing. It will be time for the deer and her fawn to face the cold, hungry winter, and they are preparing. It will be time for milkweed pods to explode and launch their seeds, each hanging from its own silk parachute, to lie dormant through the winter. It will be time for the wild turkeys to hunker down and try to stay alive, and they are fattening themselves as quickly as they can. I love California, but feeling the year here wheel through the familiar cycles of my childhood, I realize how much I have missed it.