Still September

Closer and closer to bidding a gentle Farewell to Summer, though afternoons are stretching wider than wide with a pink light that just says LINGER.   Summer HEAT has a way of smothering AND enhancing a lot of the glories of the season, like watching those tiny green tomatoes swell just from sunrise to sunset, gaining in girth and juice and promise, and of course:   Home Grown Tomatoes---totally a Reason for a Season.

SWimming is good, and ice cream, and coldcold watermelon, and dancing in the sprinklers, as well as sleeping with not much on but a fan.  Popsicles, bike rides, A/C, cold wet washrags just wrung out of the ice chest and slapped on the back of your neck at the lake.

 Wide-hipped funeral parlor fans and a big old umbrella at a ball game.  Little kids giggling as THEY race in and out of the sprinklers, the hose, the front door nekkid, with those joyously-scared, gleeful screeches. 

A big gray weathered picnic table in the shade, home of cookout suppers, watermelon cuttings and fish fries for three generations---all spread up with the usual Summertime fare of whatever each family is partial to, potato-salad being the closest-guarded secret in the bunch.

That dusty corn patch with the brand-newest ears and the crackly-smitttch of the husks as you peel them back to expose the rows of milky pearls.   The eager hunt when little children find out the secret hiding places of radishes and carrots, spotting the tiny gleams of colour beneath the flourish of stem, and unearthing them with the fervor of an Easter Egg Hunt.  We’ve had so many standing in glasses and jars of water in the fridge we didn’t have room for the milk and eggs.  

 Driving along country roads with the windows down, feeling that unmistakable shift in coolth when you pass a grove of trees between you and the sun.   You can just feel the trees breathe their coolest breath onto you from those untraveled havens.     Flowin' wells with the coldest, clearest water on earth, and even if you don't want a drink, you sure want to take off your shoes and let it gush over your feet. 

A big old hand-crank freezer out in the shade on a Sunday afternoon, when the city cousins come out from town, ready to look down on your country raisin' and remote location, and leave wishing THEY lived near a swimming hole, good climbing-trees and all those watermelons, right there to choose from.

The tiny translucent golden thumb-plums and the huge musky purple ones swelling with a surfeit of Summer juices, and the blackberries and dewberries plumping in the bramble, enough to make braving the thorns a lesser thing than leaving all that sweet temptation for the birds.

The look of Southern shade on a Summer afternoon, as the shadows across the lawn grow longer and more ancient, somehow---something about the dying of the day brings shadows totally different from morning shade, with the sun-slants and more lazy colours---we'd know what time it was anywhere. 

 The scent of a backyard grill or a real barbecue pit, sending up the scent of smoky pork like incense to Heaven.  I've never done it, but I'll bet sitting up all night in a rattly aluminum-and-weave  foldin' chair beside that big brick pit or fancifully-shaped-and-painted rig, as a whole pig relaxes in the heat and becomes succulent and tender, falling apart like shattered roses---I'll bet that experience, with the attendant cooler of beer, the Vy-eenies and crackers and hoop cheese and the tales told again and again, to the same close folks as last time---doesn't that seem a thing for a Bucket List?