The sound of August
is the shrill music of the cicada. It is not in itself
a sweet music, but it has all of summer in it -- the fullness, ripening,
and dreamy turn toward a new season. It means that corn is ripe, tomatoes
are at their best, and country kitchens smell of spices and vinegar and
brown sugar.
Goldenrod spreads tawny gold along the old rail fences, and chicory stars
the road edges with sky blue. Alice and Anne, the granddaughters, carry
small baskets to the thicket where blackberries ripen. When you are nine or
seven years of age and love blackberries, it is hard to fill baskets. The
girls come in with purple-stained faces. The wild blackberries at
Stillmeadow are small and almost spicy and very dark in color. I do not
know whether some early settler started them or if they are native.
If we save enough berries we can make fresh blackberry jam. For an outdoor
breakfast corn muffins and jam just belong with eggs and bacon.
Curt, my son-in-law, usually gets breakfast, and he has a special way with
bacon so that every slice is paper-thin and delicately crisp and never
dripping fat or unevenly cooked. The eggs are gently fried in an almost-dry
skillet and turned once so that they are pale gold on both sides. I admire
anyone who feels like springing up and cooking a fine breakfast, but I am
not one of them. I belong to the group that consists of those who can stay
up most of the night but find getting up a challenge hard to face.
When I was growing up, there was thought to be something sinful about late
rising, and this feeling must go back far in history, perhaps to the time
when men worshipped the sun, and dawn meant the sun-god had not deserted
mankind. My father rose with the sun and expected Mamma and me to do the
same. So my mother never had a full night's sleep because she simply could
not go to bed at nine in the evening and drop off. She used to sit in the
little front sewing room and sew half the night, and then have to get up
when Papa did. She was basically a woman of great stamina but often had a
tired look in her beautiful dark brown eyes.
Papa's method of making the next-door neighbors behave properly was to run
the lawn mower right under their windows. It was a noisy mower, and so the
scheme worked. "No use lying around all day," he said when Mamma tried to
reason with him.
I do not think he would like the new theory that some people are night
people and some are day people. He would not believe in metabolism being
different -- or whatever it is -- because he would know perfectly well that
sensible people get up at the proper time and go to bed at the proper time.
And he would say that napping is a dissolute habit unless you are over
ninety!
For a homemaker, it is time to look ahead to Labor Day, because the season
moves inexorably ahead and we cannot stay it. I like to live daily, but
even I begin to think of Alice and Anne losing the enlarging freedoms of
the country and being in school again. How fortunate we are in these United
States that children may go to school! There are some parts of our country
where they do not, though, and I find this a blemish on our record. But
over most of our land the children now begin to say, "I don't want summer
to end. I don't want to go to school!"
The natural reaction to a set routine has always been this in any culture,
I think. In mature years most people sigh because they could not have
more school: "Oh, how I wish I had had a chance to study
archaeology!" Or electronics. Or foreign languages. Life is a learning, and
the basic wonder of life is that we can learn, opening new
vistas as long as we live.
It is 5:33 in the morning when the Sturgeon Moon sheds its full radiance
over Stillmeadow. I do not know whether this is the latest of all the
moons, but it is almost dawn this year before this moon shows its whole
orb. And I may say its special radiance on ripening valley and green hills
is worth getting up for. May this moon's glow also light our hearts!
--Gladys Taber
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