August Incoming

I love the month of August when, with  few exceptions, the air turns drier and softer. I love my flip flops, t-shirts and shorts but in August I wear my long swishy skirts which make me feel bohemian and natural, like a 70’s tie-dyed hippie. I sashay into our village on errands to buy new shower curtain rings at the hardware store or a pound of my favorite French butter at our fine cheese shop.

Of course, my playlist has Taylor Swift’s magical song August where I was so struck by the line “the rust on your door, I never needed anything more…”  Put a door in a song, and my imagination conjures up the old musty beach houses of my girlhood. “So I walk up to the doorstep, through the screen and I cross the floor…Summer Breeze…blowing jasmine through my mind.

When I tire of paper curtains in cottages and food on the grill for two, I turn to Morgan Wallin’s heartrending Seven Summer’s Ago. He only needs to wail “Do you ever think about that boy from East Tennessee” and I hear the voice of a man I once loved, also from East Tennessee, and yes, I do know it was seven summers ago – or was it a hundred? And how long ago was the August I sat on a decrepit log near the water’s edge with a boy I also once loved, a bag of pretzels between us, bought at a gas station and scraped over a shared and sweaty block of cream cheese until the old cop in our town shown his spotlight on us and ordered us home? Yes, it’s sad to know that was acres and acres of summers ago…

Another joy of lovely August is the native tomatoes that only come for a few weeks once a year. I get out my tart cookbook which also only comes out once a year and make my favorite tart from page 42 where a splatter of juices from a tomato with a single seed sticks to the ingredient list along with a blot of dried oil.

In August there are still summer joys and better weather for boating, swimming and reading outdoors. I never turn down a beach day or time near the water for I still have straw hats that need to be trotted out in the light of day before they take their rest in old hat boxes on the shelves above the winter coats. Soon, I will close those boxes and reach for my faithful red puffer vest.  I am certain of it.

By August I’ve watched Rear Window and sweated along with L.B. Jeffries, Stella and Lisa Fremont in Hitchcock’s high humidity thriller.  I also took in Midsummer Night and swimming in moats in I Capture the Castle. But I save late August for my very favorite:  The Whales of August where two lovely elderly sisters come to terms with aging and life in their very different ways.  I can smell the pine walls and the just-caught fish frying on their ancient stove. And I see the deep and dark waters where the black whales come from the arctic on their journey home, bringing fall air on thundering waving tails in the sea at the bottom of their weathered porch.  There is nothing further away from influencers than immersing yourself in The Whales of August.

The sturdy sunflowers must not be forgotten, a vase of just three is a complete feast and dramatically remind me that summer’s end is coming with light as golden and luminous as their petals.  August, outgoing…

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The wind wraps poems around my skin, stories of summers that once might have been ~ Unknown