While the season hasn’t officially arrived, early signs of fall are everywhere in Humptulips County. Temperatures fluctuate a good deal during the course of each week and between each night and the following day, the rain has come back in compact, intermittent storms that are often violent, and the light softened almost two weeks ago to relieve the glare of high summer. Make no mistake – it’s still summer and higher temperatures are expected to return by week’s end. But this summer is breathing its last. The period I call Summer-Swan is upon us – that time of year when August’s high, harsh sun gradually becomes an overripe melon incapable of sustaining summer’s furnace.
The most startling aspect of this year’s change – and perhaps of any year – is the activities of our local birds. I hadn’t noticed they’d been hiding from the sun until the first serious rainfall of August. As I walked to our mailbox to get our morning papers on the day after the storm last week, joyous birdsong came from every direction and from near and far. The morning’s chorus was so raucous that it was noticeable by comparison. I’d grown accustomed to the anemic, desultory birdsong of high summer; this was a complex, roiling Beethoven Mass rather than a beloved folk song fingered upon a lone acoustic guitar.
The air was damp and refreshing rather than humid; the sun had returned to dominate the sky. While puddles on the paved turnaround at the front of our house persisted in the shade of the pines, the dirt under the pines and on the surface of our lower driveway was dry. Whatever rain had fallen there had been gulped down by an ever-thirsty ground. There were no visual traces left of the rain other than the puddles remaining on the tarmac; only the clean smell of dust-free air and the emotional certainty that summer’s remorseless grip had begun to unclench remained as its tell-tales.
When I returned to the house, I went to get a drink of water at our kitchen sink. I was watching the neighbor’s horses grazing in a distant pasture when I was distracted by a movement in my peripheral vision. There, in the largest remaining puddle, were the neighborhood’s two mated European Collared Doves bathing together. It was as if I was watching a ballet. They sat side-by-side splashing and raising first a left wing and then a right in synchronous display, turn and turn about. When they’d had enough, they walked demurely away from the puddle with dignity and grace .
They were quickly replaced by a boisterous group of sparrows. Watching them was akin to watching a football game. Each dove into the puddle, splashed about frenetically for a few moments, then chased a colleague away. Each evicted sparrow flew off in a seeming huff, only to return as quickly as possible to go on offense once again. This bathe-and-chase game continued until the spin cycle was over and each had his or her fill of the rain’s remaining largesse.
If the puddle had been large enough, I would have joined them. It was that kind of day. It came after weeks under a harsh sun with nary a hint of rain; it came after a brief, soaking storm of the kind that promises more to come. It came before the very notion of rain loses its novelty, before rainstorms become things of dreary procession. Each time one season turns into another, there is novelty in the to-become-expected; relief in the tried-and-true of the forthcoming and the waning of the oft-repeated present. For we are as fickle as the birds.
