A Taste Of Summer.

July is an intense month – the blazing sun, the misty nights.  Frogs and flowers, storms and crickets.  Everything heats up, gets larger, more insistent.  Working men with bronzed backs feel every inch of their glistening skin, pretty women in sticky sun dresses stand back-lit by the July sun, unfurling themselves like sails in search of a breeze.  Babies startled by ice cream brain-freeze lunge gleefully for more as you drive slowly past, turn the wheel and head up-country for your Daily Cool.

You motor past thinning neighborhoods to where the barns live, then out past that, and before long the pavement turns to gravel, the poles and wires fall away, and you’re alone in a green Cathedral, your face dappled with sunlight and shadows, green light and birdsong accompanying the crunch of the road beneath your tires:

There’s a stream with a nice swimming hole up here, and you head for it to sit watching the cool water swirl around your feet as you study the efforts of whoever was there last:

This is how summer should be, the stuff of muted memories, less spectacle and more substance, life in the slow lane.

Refreshed, you meander homeward.  As the sun gathers its rays together for a Last Hurrah you glide along beneath a rising moon, tall grasses wave to the fading day:

Friday night the moon will be full; make a note to bring the camera out on Thursday, weather permitting, to catch it rising fifty minutes or so before sunset.

Goodnight, my friends.