There is no word for the transition from summer to late summer, from late summer to early fall, but the subtle signs of the cold to come already are upon us. Outside my study window, the orb-weaver once again has spun her wagon-wheel web. It seems to grow bigger every day. Already a tiny midge or gnat is caught in it – hanging on as sure as a dinner reservation.
In the meadow, the goldfinches have arrived. They wait until the bee balm goes to seed before they swoop in, their feathers like falling yellow petals – a dozen circling would make a bloom.
Blackbirds descend on the driveway and back lawn, strutting around, pecking at the ground. Some leave their beaks open as though not taking any chances of missing a morsel. Two bump into each other, creating a comical dust-up. They have the iridescent purple feathers of grackles, but the bill and tail are wrong. They are definitely not starlings. They are common crows, but there seems nothing common about them. I could watch their antics all day. Soon, however, they have taken off en masse for greener pastures. Not all crows migrate, but I wonder if these are bulking up to journey a little farther south. Thoreau saw them winging that way as late as Nov. 1.
At Weekapaug, the red seaweed at the water’s edge is another sign of this shoulder season. It tends to proliferate near the end of the year (and is not be confused with red tide, a toxic algae more common in in bays). Nature’s impulse this time of year leans toward profusion: make more, and more, she seems to be saying, as a hedge against lean times to come.
We humans also are caught in these in-between times. For those of us who teach, August brings the dreaded syllabus, the making of which is a task both hopeful and tedious. We scratch away at it, hoping this year’s version will be an improvement over last year’s. August has a last-chance quality about it – last beach day, last ice-cream cone, last outdoor festival. With remarkable regularity my journal marks these days: dread over the coming end to summer’s freedom, determination that this year I will make time for my writing once school starts. “We are in that littoral zone between summer and fall,” I wrote last year in late August. “The tattered flowers know it. The katydids and crickets know it. The first loosened leaves floating off the black walnut trees know it.”
Yet, there is something comforting about this seasonal shift. It brings to mind all the other times autumn arrived before its astronomical turning. Across the street from this house, a dying maple tree turned bright orange in August each year, as sure a sign of the coming fall as back-to-school ads and the bus schedule in the newspaper. In high school I leafed through Glamour magazine’s College Issue and planned my school wardrobe. This, in the magazine’s exaggerated prose, would be my best fall ever! Somehow, those predictions rang hollow by October, when all that had changed was the stack of school books on my desk.
At home, we buttoned up the house for winter. My father filled the woodbox each night, dumping oak into it with a clatter. My mother ripped up her dahlias and put their tubers to bed in shoeboxes. Then as now, the birds took flight, the maple leaves shriveled and dropped, the crickets and katydids were at last silenced.
That early maple was felled years ago. In this old house we no longer have a wood stove to cheer the coming cold. But I saw some dahlias at the park on Tuesday, and I thought of my mother, gone more than a decade now. The memories of this transitory season return as surely as the orb-weaver spinning her web.
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