August, the Month That Fills Itself

The heat arrives before the coffee in August, low and close, and it settles into the kitchen like a houseguest who intends to stay. The calendar on the wall has begun to thin. June and July are a scramble of ink, appointments made back in the spring and kept or broken in the rush of school letting out, the first cookout, the cousins' graduation. August shows wide white squares where a Saturday used to be.

The white squares are not a failure. They are the month doing its quiet work.

Mornings start slow in that heat. The dew holds on the grass until nine, then the lawn goes pale and crisp and the sprinklers come on, arcing over the fence into the neighbor's yard. By eleven the cicadas are running their long, frayed buzz, and nobody is going anywhere in a hurry. The sweet corn is past knee-high and on its way to the supper table, silks drying in the sun. Tomatoes on the counter give off the smell that heat coaxes out of them, a low sweet green note that fills the kitchen.

The middle of the day belongs to shade. The chairs sit in a circle on the north side of the house, under the oak, where the grass stays damp and cool until midafternoon. A glass of tea sweats on the armrest. The dog lies in the dust under the porch and does not move for hours. It is too hot for errands and too late in the season for the urgency that errands carried in June. The list of things to do has quietly turned into a list of things that can wait, and August is an expert at waiting.

After lunch the thunderhead builds over the treeline, as regular as the freight, making its slow white pile. It may come to nothing, or it may arrive at four o'clock with a sheet of lightning and rain so heavy the gutters run full and the rain bounds off the driveway. Then it clears, and the evening drops down blue and washed, with the particular cool that August only lends after rain.

Company Arrives Unsummoned

The unplanned Saturday in August rarely stays solitary, because the month is full of company that shows up without being asked.

The neighbor appears at the fence holding two tomatoes the size of softballs, surplus from the garden. There is an easy math to late summer — there are more where those came from, and the giving is part of the harvest. One thing leads to another, and by five the grill is going and the potato salad has made the trip from the other porch. Someone's cousin arrives from two states over, in town because the family needed a funeral or a wedding or just because August is the month people get in the car. Nobody checks the number of cars out front. There is always another chair in the garage.

Out past the edge of town the fair has put up its lights, and in a week or two it will take them down again without much notice. The rides clank in the evening air. The animals sleep against their pens, heavy in the heat. The stand with the funnel cake turns out the same kind of cake it turned out twenty years ago, in the same kind of oil, and it tastes like a sentence your memory already wrote. Nobody planned the visit. The glow came over the horizon and the truck ended up in the fairground lot, and the night went on late enough that the ride operators looked tired and the kids fell asleep in the back seat with powdered sugar on their shirts.

Porches fill in the evening, when the light goes long and honey-colored and the chairs come out of the garage. People who worked all week sit next to people who have nowhere else to be. The conversation takes the shape of the hour, starting with the heat and the rain and ending deep in some story that has nothing to do with anything. A sprinkler throws its fine arc into the dusk and the children run through it until they are called off, mostly for form. The citronella candle does what it can. Nobody looks at a watch, because the phone is inside and that is where it stays.

None of it was on the calendar. All of it happened anyway, the way August company does — it arrives unsummoned and stays as long as the light holds.

The Bounty Without Errand

August gives with both hands. The supper table holds sliced tomatoes with salt, corn shucked by three people at the sink, okra fried in a black skillet, a watermelon cold from the basement stairs. Someone always grows more zucchini than anyone can use, and the surplus moves from porch to porch like a chain letter, a squash doing the rounds of the whole block before it finally meets a shredder and becomes bread.

The farmstand at the crossroads does an honest business, a box of cash held down by a brick, a chalkboard price that changes with the sun. The woman who runs it waves drivers over from the road as if the vegetables were on loan and the loan was almost up. The peaches are the kind that have to be eaten leaning over the sink; the melons give a low thump when rapped. Nobody argues with the quality, and nobody argues with the price, because both are simply what August is.

There is canning to be done, and canning in August is a social event dressed up as a chore. One kitchen fills with steam and jars and the good-natured argument about who puts sugar in the tomatoes and who does not. The counters are lined with what the garden surrendered, and by the end of the afternoon the shelves hold rows of color to last the winter. The work is real, but the pace is not July's pace. The only timer that goes off belongs to the stove.

The storm that broke the heat has left the air rinsed. People sit on the steps with plates in their laps, wet hair, the smell of rain and cut grass rising off the yard. The day that had nothing on the calendar has handed out more than a full one usually does, and the dishes can wait until the dark has fully come.

Long Shadows

Somewhere in the last week of the month the light changes, and it is the light that tells the truth before anyone else does. The afternoons put on an edge. Shadows stretch earlier across the lawn, the barn swallows gather on the wires in numbers that were not there at the start of the month, and the mornings come in a few degrees cooler — enough that a person on the porch reaches for a second cup before the first has properly cooled.

The school supply lists appear in the drugstore window. College trunks get packed in the driveway and the first cars full of kids head back down the highway. But not yet. The last Saturdays of August are the truest ones, because by then everyone has learned the month's lesson and stopped trying to improve on it. Nobody schedules the finale. The last cookout happens because the weather gives one more perfect evening, or because the cousin is leaving in the morning, or simply because the chairs are already out.

The moon comes up big and low over the field line, orange through the last heat. Fireflies make their slow float. August rounds itself off the way it began, without ceremony, full of what it was given — company, and the bounty of the garden, and the last of the long light. The calendar still has white squares on it. They are the point of the month, and they will be filled by the month itself.