Marley and Me
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Favorite Season
Labor Day is now past, which means we have just entered my favorite eight weeks of the year. This is my season. From the day after Labor Day until Halloween is the divine time. It's still warm, but the humidity has left the air. The nights are cool enough for a blanket. Sunset, that late-night, forever delayed celebration of summer, is again coming at a more civilized hour. Tonight by 7:30, dusk was already upon us; in July, the coals for dinner would not even have been lit.
Out in the garden, the sunflowers and tithonia and Joe Pye weed are in full, lusty bloom. The goldenrod has turned the meadows to yellow. The roses have put out their second, late-season bloom. An endless supply of ripe tomatoes and pungent basil and fresh pole beans and squash and peppers are there for the picking. Life is good. A few weeks ago I harvest several dozen heads of garlic; they are now dried and papery and perfect, hanging in the garage where I can pick a head at will, crush cloves into olive oil, add diced tomatoes and basil, spread it over crusty bread. Bliss.
With each week now the days will grow shorter, the nights crisper, the signs of another season of slumber fast approaching. It will be time to split and stack the firewood I cut last year out deep in the woods behind my house. A fallen cherry tree, a dropped walnut, a couple poplars...they will be the blazing good-cheer of winter nights to come. Soon frost will nip at dawn, leaving its hoary silvery crust upon the grass. I'll be out there at midnight, covering the tomato plants with old blankets, trying to squeeze a couple extra weeks out of them.
The light is different this time of year, golden and slanted and full of hope. A light you'd expect in Tuscany, and yet here it is on a sleepy hillside in Pennsylvania, shafting through the white pines, bathing the towering cornfields in gauzy gold, dancing over the soybeans. A happy light.
A happy light, and yet this is the very same light of 9/11. The light of that brilliant and dreadful day. And so the heart's surge is tinged with sadness. You see that light, you smell the earth's fecundity, you take in the bountiful harvest in the fields, and it all comes back. And it will always come back. The gentle season forever will hold this now, too. At least for this lifetime, it will stand as the most eloquent memorial to that day. Nature's way of saying goodness and gentleness will in the end prevail.
It is the kind season, the season of blinding light. My favorite season of all. And yet, now, it too is something more.
posted by John Grogan at 8:39 PM
 
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