September

I love the soft crooning of crickets, but when I hear them I think Noooooooooo, summer can't be running out on me yet! Much as I love cricket song, I love nights when I can leave the sprinklers on until I'm ready for bed, and then I just slip on some sandals and walk out in my pjs to turn them off. I love looking at stars and the moon on the deck. I love getting up early in the morning and working until I'm hungry, which is usually around 10 or 11am, and then I have second breakfast. I love the dry weather that keeps the grass tidy, and the summer rainstorms that sometimes come with thunder and that summer after-rain smell that inspires foolish grins and drunken behavior. I love the swoop and dive of swallows, and the hummingbird wars. I love discovering praying mantises, and as the season grows late, seeing bigger and bigger ones. I love the contrast between sweating in the hot sun and cooling down in the shade of trees with a glass of cold well water. I love working in my bikini. I like the way washing a car feels all sloppy and sudsy and dirty and somehow you end up with a clean car at the end. I like wandering the garden paths at night. I like the swarming birds that come after ripe berries and fluffy seeds.

I love autumn too, and the wandering feelings and intense rushes of longing it inspires, the changes and the sweetness of garden beds gradually dozing off like unruly children finally converting to that angelic stage (asleep,) but there's something special about summer. August is done, and onward to September.

An aside: I managed to stay up and watch the lunar eclipse. Once upon a time, as a child, it happened relatively early in the evening so that I could watch. I'd imagined the moon getting eaten up by blackness. Boy, was I disappointed. I stomped back to the house in a huff, annoyed by boredom. I don't know if explaining the whys and hows would have helped. As an adult, though, I had a good time marveling and staring. Maybe the telescope helped. Maybe it was an appreciation for all those subtle colors of red, amber, burnt orange and how they transitioned from the moon's normally pale surface that did it for me. I dunno. There was just something really neat about the Earth's atmosphere filtering the wee bit of sunlight that got around our massive globe to those burning hues, and the way the shadow's movement didn't seem quite linear but looked like it advanced and retreated in micro-sways, and imagining myself standing on the moon and watching a solar eclipse flare around it. Just like a solar eclipse on Earth, it doesn't turn to night-darkness, just a deep shadow like heavy clouds had passed over the sun. And I wonder, had I been on the moon during an Earthan eclipse, what color the moon's shadow would be on Earth. Would it be reddish also, paler because the atmosphere is so thin as to be non-existant? Would it be a neutral shadow? Would the shadow of the moon on the Earth be too small to see? Or would it be a fabulously perfect round, a cut-out shadow traveling across the world?

So I watched, with Rory beside me, and wondered and let my gaze wander around the Milky Way for over an hour, and afterward I slept so deep and dreamt about being an actress.

I wonder what September will bring.