Once Again

The light has turned. Every year it happens and every year it catches me by surprise. Just when I think summer will never end, it begins to wane.

The foretelling was there, of course, in the raucous hummingbird migration and the enfolding chorus of droning cicadas, crickets and katydids. Insect calls have picked up where spring's bird song left off and the surrounding woods are filled with rhythmic rattling and tinkling throughout the day and well into the evening. The birds are not entirely silent but they are collectively quieter now than earlier in the season. A couple of early morning wood thrushes trill, a single wood peewee whistles, a red-throated vireo questions, and then all is silent again, apart from the insects.

Monarchs float across the landscape, nectaring and laying eggs that will turn into this year's migrants heading to Mexico in a month or so. Lavender mistflower is coming into bloom, and early goldenrod and ironweed dot the roadsides, deep golds and purples, colors of royalty. Scattered here and there through the woodlands stand solitary black gums dressed crimson, harbingers of early autumn, soon to come.

Except for the manic hummingbirds, the season seems to pause, like the river that stills momentarily between the rising and falling tides. Such is an illusion however, as flowers set seeds, wild fruit ripens, insects mate and birds and mammals fatten for whatever lies in the months ahead. 

I am caught between savoring today's unfolding, and knowing what is to come. Predictably, I swing between exhilaration and melancholy, between breathing in the sweetness of each late-summer moment and grieving for what will soon disappear- osprey and barn swallows, butterflies and singing insects, flowers and foliage. 

O, to be like a child, living each day fully for itself, as yet unpracticed in anticipating change. And yet...might not this unwanted anticipation become the very fuel of my gratitude  for what is now ?