Sands, Running

We’ve had a respite from the August heat for a few days. This past weekend, it was so chilly in the mornings and evenings, I had to put on a light jacket in order to sit outside comfortably. This coming weekend is supposed to be more typical of late August, with temperatures back up in the mid-to-high 80s.

But the sphere is tilting and the sands are running through the narrow neck, and the effects, while slight, are most definitely there. The crickets keep up a steady chorus. The little things that migrate are extra-busy, flitting and feeding constantly. The leaves are applying their grown-up makeup. The late afternoon sun has that look that makes me pause and stare at it as it colors the silent ground, and sometimes I cannot recall what I was thinking while I was staring. The autumn is coming, and no one can halt it in its march to us.

There have been days when the sun has wearied me, when the humidity has sapped my strength and my motivation and turned the smallest chore into a dramatic struggle. Days when I felt as if I were being forced to hide inside the house because the outdoor world was so oven-like. Evenings when it was impossible to settle in with a book because the air was sultry and at 9:00 pm the sky was still light. Stretches of days and nights when I had to be on guard because of the powerful summer storms that routinely lash these mountains. In the summer, I so often think of how pleasant it will be to feel the chill in the air and to note how that chill and its accompanying darkness beckons me to light a lamp and cover my legs with a comforter and read or listen to music in the frigid stillness of weather that bids me remember my bloodline and the climes in which my people lived.

But look…how curious. Even as the summer wanes and the air takes on a new tang, my inconstant mind finds a new thing to worry with, like a hand rubbing a sore elbow. What if the winter is particularly brutal? What if we lose power for long periods as we have in past years? I am behind in my firewood supply. Shoveling snow will be even more unkind to my back than it was last year. What if we have a medical emergency during one of those periods when the road leading down out of the mountains is piled with snow which hides a lethal layer of ice? Perhaps summer isn’t so bad. Perhaps it should stay a bit longer. After all, I don’t have to warm up a car or scrape a windshield or bundle up to walk down to the mailbox in the summer. Perhaps I’ve misjudged, been hasty, failed to appreciate the daily blessings of the season in which I find myself.

And when I think such thoughts, I also think about people who have just learned that they have a terminal illness. How their minds must wander over the landscape of their lives and find fresh features to appreciate. Being told that in six months, after a period of decline and pain and drowsing in the arms of Morpheus, such people probably want to stop time, or at least slow it down. They probably find all sorts of things about their lives that are quite lovely. Things they’d still like to accomplish. Things they’d like to do over, or fences they’d like to mend. And in every hour they see how inexorable is the approach of…the next season.

In this particular air, I am trying to slow down the hours. I think of Laura Wood’s lovely post from almost a year ago in which she mentions old, weary bees taking naps on flowers in the sunshine. I will probably long for the summer sun when my knuckles are knotted and swollen, and when I cannot get my feet warm, and when my wife and I are reading or playing a board game by lantern-light in the eerie stillness of an electricity-less house, and when I am cutting a path for the dogs with a shovel through knee-high snow.

I will wish I had the time back, the time of warmth, the time of free movement.  I am fickle, because I am a man, because I am a child of God.

~ S.K. Orr