Month of Daydreams

Petals Falling

It is August. The sun has burned the grass crisp as toast. Fans are whirring. Curtains are pulled back. Down in the cellar, the dehumidifier collects buckets of water from the damp brick and concrete. At night, I lie in the still heat and remember childhood when my sister and I slept at the foot of our beds to catch a bit of breeze, and I would wake displaced by tangled dreams.

Dog days, they’re called, the twenty days before and after the rise and fall of Sirius, the Dog star. I think of Carson McCullers’s “…saucer of lavender sour milk.” I think of the way the flower petals fall in the midnight kitchen when the windows are closed, the fan at rest, and the jungle cacophonies in the darkness on the other side of the rusty screens. I think of the ocean water with its warm, murky depths, and the southwest wind sultry with bayous’ humidity.

I move listlessly through the rooms of my house, avoiding the ones shimmering in the hot, bright light where tiny spiders appear overnight in the corners. All earnest attempts at effort seem silly and futile. Words come hard at this pace; my mind seems sleepier at noon than at midnight.

August is the month of daydreams before September’s crisp call to learn, organize, engage. It is a time to watch one maple leaf stir as if everything depended on that whisper. It is a time to pick one tomato and eat it right there in the garden or field with the sun burning your shoulders. It is a time to smell scorched pine needles and funky low tide. A time to listen to the corn growing, the sighs of the nodding roses.

Like the yellowed curtain drifting behind me, my mind floats, seems prone to reverie, to memories of August days when the only cool spot was the dim little library or the shores of a dark green lake. When we ate dinner at 5:30 and the screen doors slammed up and down West Main. When the nights were alive with cicadas, crickets, thrilling games of hide and seek, and years later, the breathlessness of first love. When September loomed on the horizon with a foreboding we tried to ignore.

It is August. Sirius has completed its rise and fall, but the Dog days continue. I have little to say. Much to dream.