August is here

Pinnacle of summer? Beginning of the End? You decide.

August here means living in two seasons at once. The one you’re in and the one you’re already anticipating because it’s even better.

The other night I was sitting on the back steps watching the dogs patrol the yard for challenges to their fiefdom, and I noticed the fireflies. Not a few. Dozens, blinking on and off over grass I haven’t mowed in a month because the lawnmower is broken and the guy who fixes them is booked out past Labor Day and the guy who cuts my neighbors grass is too busy to even return phone calls in August. My neighbors have opinions about my yard right now, I’m sure. But the fireflies don’t care that the grass is a disaster. They love it. And it’s a bargain I’m totally willing to strike, even it means I’m up here trying to sell houses while my own looks a little abandoned.

Down south, where I grew up, we called fireflys lightning bugs. As kids we’d catch them in mason jars and pinch off their glowing butts to wear them as rings and necklaces while we ran around in the dark. Now, I recognize this as a fairly macabre thing to do to a lovely insect, but anyone who has read Flannery O’Connor knows Southerners have a grim streak and none of the adults ever said a word. These beautiful bugs have gotten rare in a lot of places, especially the kind of paved-in city neighborhood I grew up in. Up here, it turns out, all you have to do is neglect your lawn for four weeks and they show up in droves. I told my 3 year old niece they’re fairies giving out wishes, and I’m happy she’ll carry that memory into adulthood instead of my own of wanton murder and grotesque jewlery.

That’s August for me. Equal parts abundance and permission to let something go. The nostalgia of summer memories and the anticipation of future happiness. The warmth of midday and the barest hint of fall in the air at dawn.

Here in the Lakes Region, August doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like the fullest version of what came before it. The water is finally warm enough to get into without steeling yourself first. The days are still long enough that a 6 p.m. swim feels ordinary instead of stolen. The bear cubs are out on their own now, peeking around trees in the woods like they’re not sure yet if the world is dangerous or fascinating. My rooster, the first one I’ve ever kept, is testing out his crow, not quite committed to the bit but trying it on for size. Apples are starting to show on my trees, green and hard and still two months from anything you’d want to eat. Everything is exactly as much as it can be in this moment and not a thing more.

And also. In the Walgreens in Wolfeboro last week there was a cart of Halloween candy and decor sitting by the pharmacy, waiting to be assigned an aisle. Not stocked yet. Just staged. Waiting. And even though I love fall, and Samhain most of all, I’m not quite ready y’all.

That’s the part people who only visit in summer don’t usually feel, the way the ending arrives inside the peak instead of after it. On Facebook the boat people have started leaving comments like “IYKYK, the best boating is still to come,” which sounds like a brilliant piece of social marketing by Goodhue, but is really a secret handshake among locals that the countdown is on. In the coffee shops the staff who start to prepare your order while you’re still six deep in the line give you a look that means the same thing. Only a few more weeks. Not said out loud. Just a knowing glance that communciates that it will soon be locals season again.

I used to think loving a place meant wanting the good part to last forever. Living here year round has taught me something different. They’re all good parts. I love August wholeheartedly. And, I’m looking forward to what comes next. I’m in the moment, but I’m also gleeful about the future. It’s not some tidy metaphor about impermanence you might read on a bottle of kombucha. Its just the plain fact that I can be sitting in traffic on Main Street, listening to the melange of music mingling from 7 cars and motorcycles, sunburned and completely happy, while some other part of me is already standing in a crisp driveway drinking in woodsmoke and contentment. I’m not choosing between the hammock in the ruins of the old barn and the sweater weather that’s coming. I want both, each in their moment, equally, which shouldn’t be possible and somehow just is.

A client of mine, relocating from New Mexico, stood in a yard with me this week and just said, “everything is so green.” She meant it as a compliment, I think, but it also sounded a little like awe at an alien landscape. And I remember thinking she was seeing the top layer of something that takes longer to actually feel. The green is real. So is the version of this place that shows up in November with the leaves gone and the tourists gone and the lake gone quiet and mean-looking under a flat sky. You don’t get to keep one without eventually meeting the other. I think that’s most of what people are actually asking me when they ask what it’s really like to live here. And most of us who choose this place, love them both equally. The verdant abundance and the stark beauty.

So sure, I want more summer. I want more naps in that hammock, more evenings on the water after the day-trippers clear out, more sitting in traffic looking for parking on Main Street. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also looking forward to what’s next. The mornings that finally beg for a sweater. The kids back in school, which I will not pretend to be sad about. Woodsmoke instead of bugspray. I moved here because I love winter too, the kind of cold that burns a little on the way in. That’s still months off, but it doesn’t mean I can’t eagerly await it while still enjoying the warmth of the sun on my shoulders when I come up for air in Lake Wentworth.

For now it’s August. The bugs are out, the grass is a mess, and I’m right here. I’m also already a little bit in October, and if I’m honest, that’s the part I like best about living here instead of just visiting it. Not one season ending so another can start. Both of them, at once, taking up the same amount of room in your imagination.

Here’s to loving what is and whats to come just as much.

Jenn

Keys to the Lakes