High Summer musing

July swings out over dark water and hangs like summer lightning in the air. It warbles in deep ravines and stirs the tassels of the meadow grass. It basks, and it browses with berry-stained fingers. It swells with fruit, puts on new twining growth, or bolts to seed before the second planting.July is a firefly that strays from the field, and winks by the roadside after dark. July is the mint in the effervescent glass. It drives with the top down, sun bleached, nut brown. It goes barelegged, crosshatched, bramble-scratched. It wafts in the window and tempts us from our labors like sirens in the sea.July does not wear that first green blush, nor its tattered August hem. It hangs its linen washing on the line. July is muscular and confident, like a mountain stream when it reaches the flatlands, coiling in oxbows, mingling with other tributaries. It does not sense the relentless pull of the Sound, where all our waters lead. It does not heed the first cicada, droning just beyond the edge of thought ahead of the advancing season. u u uJuly shoots blanks. It does not fire in deadly earnest. It does not drop its deer. It is all about the rocket’s red glare, not the screaming hot shell. It is brash and boisterous, like backyard barbecues and Roman candles on Independence Day. These are the days of easy living before the harvest, before the All-Star Break, before the die is cast and the birds begin winging south once more. There is still time, and more still in store in these short weeks of high summer. The days slip by like childhood, a seemingly eternal present that skips and tumbles past, and finally soars where we cannot follow. Whether these thoughts become yellow-gold memories or mournful melancholy is a matter of choice and circumstance. “I will drink Life to the lees...,” says Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” I take my cue from these lines:Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.

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