AUGUST THOUGHTS

  There comes a time at the lake in late August, when it suddenly dawns on you that another summer has quietly passed you by and you scarce remember it. It seems only yesterday that the colorful crocuses were poking their heads out of the last vestiges of the melting snow pack. They were followed by a litany of different flowers, each announcing itself in another time and place, in the days of the summer season.  But now, suddenly it seems, we are down to the mums and some late season daylilies. Out on the lake the lily pads bruised and tattered as they may be, from summer storms and boats, still bob in the swells but soon they too will slip below the surface.

In the background, as I look out my window, I hear the sweet sounds of ‘Danny Boy’ playing.  “For summers gone and all the flowers dying. ‘tis you, ‘tis you, must go and I must bide.” Solitary Leaves are beginning to float down now. Early quitters, they are, falling from the protective canopies above us and calling it a summer. Along the roads the sumac is turning scarlet and red berries crown the bushes, waiting for a chance to plant their ripe seeds in mother earth. But first, like us, they must endure another winter. “But come ye back when summers on the meadow.” Yes, at some point in time we will relent and at some point, we, like those early quitters, will call it a summer too and sit back and bide our time and wish for at least one more summer to come upon the meadow, so we can do it all over again.

For in the troughs’ of old age it’s so easy to draw parallels between the earths’s seasons and our own waxing, waning, lives. My personal roll call shows several more friends and family members who have had their last summer. But if you fall as all the flowers are falling and if you’re dead as dead you well may be. I’ll come and find the place where you are lying and kneel and say an Ave there for thee. For far to long we have said “goodbye” mostly as a polite formality but now after we have said “goodbye” so many times over fallen friends and family, we have recognized the finality of that statement and those sad goodbye’s fall on ears that have been silenced forever but never forgotten.

But its summer and not life we are bidding farewell to this time and we know that’s not the end of life as we know it. Alexander Pope said, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” He meant that even in the face of adversity, be it winter or our fading lives we have hope for another go around. Hope, like our creator, is eternal and when all else fails we draw upon it. Soon the rustle of leaves will be replaced by the first snows of winter and we will bide our time once more, like the Gaelic songwriter wrote in Danny Boy, “And when the valleys hushed are white with snow.” Patiently we wait for the summer to descend on the meadows once more. We have learned to cope through the difficult winter months and the anticipation of spring and summer is never far from our minds and as the earth tilts in our favor once more, those colorful crocuses will emerge once more, signaling that life goes on within the ranks of the flowers and so it will go on for us too.