A Bending of the Light

It happens every year at about this time without fail in this part of the world. The heavy oppressive damp days of July and August descend upon us, and for days that sometimes grow into weeks, the air waves are filled more often than not with the sound of air conditioners and fans running. The sound becomes commonplace after awhile, and the silence almost deafening on days when we must turn them on early as the sun aims its hot eye once again upon us.

Without warning, the wind direction shifts from south or east to west and north, and we are refreshed by the cooler air from Canada that banishes the high summer haze from the landscape. Freed from the ephemerous curtain that hangs over everything for most of July and sometimes into August, objects become clearer, more sharply defined, colors brighter and richer, and we can see again. And then one day, again without much fanfare, there it is. The decidedly altered slant of the light, both in early morning and late afternoon, signaling once again the earth's slow but inexorable tilt away from the sun's intensity. It is almost as it if one day, the light and heat are fully upon us in their insistent mid-year way, and then the next, they have turned their attentions away from us to focus on something else besides baking us and coaxing sweat from every pore. Shadows fall sooner than they did, and birds no longer sing into the twilight hours.

It is once again coming upon my favorite time of year-early autumn. Not a huge fan of heat and humidity, I welcome the cooler drier nights of this end-of-summer month. Just knowing the evening and night will be cooler makes the day's heat more tolerable, and that this month is a gateway of sorts to that glorious season of multicolored tapestries and still mild but bug-free days. There is no question that this cool-down invigorates me and makes me want to get back out there roaming and seeing what I've been missing these last few torrid weeks.

Butterflies congregate on flower shrubs, and birds busy themselves seeking out the plump seed heads of many plants and some species of trees. My little chipmunk friend has been running back and forth across the porch these last few days, most likely foraging for and storing away supplies for the coming cold months. I've started putting bread crumbs out for him, and they are disappearing. That tiny creature keeps me grounded and connected internally to the wild places. We share a common love, it and I, for the places untrodden by the rest of the world.

At night, the window fan pulls in much cooler air now, and a very large cricket managed to sneak its way into the kitchen one day last week. It emerged in another room today, so I gently picked it up and redeposited it outside where it hopped away instantly. I hear its kind loudly now each night, one of the most familiar and comforting sounds of late summer. Its distinctive chatter, which it produces by rubbing its wings together, sometimes manages to transcend the other noises around here, coming at me from the grass beneath my bedroom window, and I find myself listening for it now at night when I manage to resist thoughts of those other things that should be consuming me but don't quite make it across the vast fields of my mind.

The end of August approaches, and right behind it, a month of beginnings and endings. Children will be returning to school, yellow buses will be rolling once again, corn fields will be shorn of their late gold, and early apples will spill from baskets at roadside stands. The seasonal shift is like an invisible wave that I have been riding now for several decades, and it is a journey I never tire of. This is the best part of the ride, when the air sweetens from the rich aroma of the season's fullness, the days shorten and the light reaches me from a different direction. For a few days, I'll see the sun rise through those trees across the street, and then one day, it won't be there. It will have slipped behind buildings and I'll miss its first peek above the urban horizon.

Through the still-green trees, this closest of morning stars scatters its brilliance among the branches through leaves more than willing to help split its light, and I find myself wishing quietly upon it as I would upon any other more distant orb as it reveals to me another new day.




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Summer Haze

During summer's warmer days, I gaze out at the woods around me as through a fog. Heat, particularly with high humidity and dew point, is tangible, settling on every growing thing like a veil. Some days, it's almost as though each leaf droops and sags beneath the burden, much as I do, as we both long for relief in the form of rain or a more northerly breeze. And when it comes, we rejoice together, they, lifting their faces once more toward the sun, and I lifting my hands, closing my eyes, and allowing the blessed relief to wash over me.

Even as the long hot summer days linger, I know of what they foretell. More and more, I'm hearing the sound of chainsaws as braver souls nearby begin work on their woodpiles even as the sun's merciless rays bear down upon them. For this is the best time to cut wood and leave it to dry while the days are still long, the heat intense, and the wind warm. More than halfway now through July, more than half of yet another year is behind us, and even these warm uncomfortable days do not linger quite as long as the earth slowly begins its downward tilt.

Summers are warmer, because the sun hits the surface of the earth in the Northern hemisphere more directly and for a longer period of time during each 24-hour period. Conversely, it's colder in the winter because the same rays strike the earth at a shorter more extreme angle, and the hours of daylight are fewer. None of this happens as a result of the earth's position in the galaxy but because its axis, which is relatively perpendicular during the warmer months, dips by about 23.5 degrees, orienting different parts of the earth toward the sun. After the Summer Solstice, or the first day of summer in the north, the earth gradually moves in its orbit in a counterclockwise path that eventually orients the southern hemisphere toward the sun, with a gradual progression toward an eastern orientation, or Winter Solstice, when all of North America and most of South America are experiencing winter.

In areas that experience the four seasons distinctly, it sometimes seems that one might last longer than another or that their progression from year to year isn't consistent, but that's not the case at all. Weather events have a lot to do with our perception of the length of the seasons, while, behind the scenes, all is progressing according to nature's schedule, one over which we have absolutely no control.

So though these warm days are draining and often uncomfortable, they never last forever, and I set my sights on the respites that nature provides us here in the north that other parts of the country aren't privy to. At some point, the wind always shifts from south to north, the haze clears and once again, each leaf and twig is visible in the sharp crisp light. It's a yearly progression, with each season unfolding from the preceding one, and each ending as imperceptibly as it began, their endings and beginnings lost beneath this endless canopy of trees and sky.


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