“Daylight… in my mind, the night faded. It was daytime and the neighbourhood was busy. Miss Stephanie Crawford crossed the street to tell the latest to Miss Rachel. Miss Maudie bent over her azaleas. It was summertime, and two children scampered down the sidewalk towards a man approaching in the distance. The man waved, and the children raced each other to him.
It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing-pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention.
It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs Dubose’s. The boy helped his sister to her feet, and they made their way home. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day’s woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive.
Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.
Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
The Summer – to the extent we have enjoyed one in Humptulips County this year – has begun to languish and drift. Summer never seems to just die overnight or to surrender itself suddenly in a stormy fit; instead, it just seems to decompose slowly into softer light and a smokey haze.
Summer’s disintegration begins with a subtle shifting of the angle of the sunlight, an agonizing shift generally felt subliminally prior to its visual manifestation. At some undefinable moment in this adjustment, we come to realize that we no longer see the sun as the high, harsh, furnace-like orb of mid-July but, rather, as the slightly overripe, softened, often blowsy melon of late August. The gradual softening of the sunlight that continues from late August to early October will eventually expose the first tendrils of a not so distant Autumn; tendrils which will eventually multiply and combine into the haze that marks the final transition zone between Summer and Autumn.
Summer’s disintegration is but a single scene in the annual drama of the seasons, a scene which, like all of the others that annually combine to form that self-same drama, bears repeating because it never bores or seems trite. The thought of four distinct seasons is, frankly, a woefully incomplete description of a year. There must be a scene change between each of the four seasons for the drama to play out, and each scene changing period has a life and a story of its own. While Spring-To-Be is forward looking in its trumpeting of the impending birth of Spring on the heels of Winter’s demise, Summer-Soon-Gone is both intensely present tense in its singular enjoyment of the fruits of a too lush world and nervously anticipatory in its faint foreshadowing of Autumn’s nostalgia. And thus it is that there is no clear boundary between any of the seasons, such that a Master Stage Hand might close a close a curtain on one only to open it anew on another moments later. Instead, we inhabit a Möbius strip, an infinitely circular dance of light and darkness, wherein one is always in the ascendancy and the other always in decline, with their relative proportions always changing incrementally, but meaningfully, without finite or abrupt changes of scene.
About now I would usually call my friend Tom, the water color artist, and tell him that the light is, indeed, changing. We usually celebrate Summer-Soon-Gone’s changing of the light by phone call, even if it seems that a glass of champagne might rather be in order. It has become our custom to notice and acknowledge this event to one another; me, because the change slowly comes to my notice as I navigate franticly through a world of business, and Tom, because it is his profession to notice light and to render its effects for the edification of others. But this year, maybe I will just post this little piece to see if Tom is paying attention.
Or, maybe he will call me before I break down and call him.
