Late Summer

It's still over 100 almost every day, but you can feel something changing. The days get off to a slower start, it's a little cooler when we first get up. And of course it gets dark earlier, making it easier to put the babies to bed. I believe we will have temperatures in the 100s through September, but interspersed with more and more days in the 90s, maybe even the 80s. Seems impossible. I'll have to go back to wearing shirts with sleeves. Maybe in October.

We have started going on morning walks again, and that feels really good. I thought it would be hard to get motivated, but it isn't. My body likes to walk. Why am I not a long, lean person -- I should be! Anyone who walks as much as I have for all these many years should be slender as a reed. I'm dreaming. Anyway, compared to most of my fellow Ridgecrestians I am skinny.

In late summer I always re-read the poem by Robert Frost called "The Oven Bird."

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

What to make of a diminished thing, I guess this is my question these days, but it has been my question for years now. Life is still very interesting once "the early petal-fall is past" but it is less exciting, with that "highway dust" over all. Of course when one has toddler twins, life is always pretty exciting, mustn't forget that.

Late summer is a melancholy time. Last year in August my family lost our beloved Uncle Bob. This year RB and I are getting ready to lose our best friend and neighbor. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the good times we had together, how much he meant to us. We're going out to Colorado this weekend to say goodbye, but I'm saying goodbye a hundred times over in my mind.