In August, Doing Nothing Is the Whole Point

By the time August rounds into its middle, the light has changed, and no one can say the day it happened. The afternoons are still all heat and cicadas. The pavement still shimmers in the late afternoon. But the morning comes up a shade later and the evening goes down a shade earlier, and the sun sits lower when the lawn chairs come out, throwing a gilt over the grass that July never had. It is the light of a month that knows September is coming and intends to enjoy itself first.

The crickets keep the schedule. They start in the fields late in July, and by August they have moved in close — under the porch steps, in the ivy, behind the window boxes — until by evening they are the whole sound of the neighborhood. Ice settles in glasses. Sprinklers tick against fences. Somewhere down the block a grill lid clanks shut, and the smoke drifts over the yards, hickory and then charcoal, the smell of an August dinner.

This is the dog-day country, the long hinge between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, and it is the only stretch of the American calendar without an assignment. Every other month has a job. May has graduations and planting. June has weddings and the first long trips. July has the holiday and the pressure of vacation. September rings the bell. August sits in the heat, unhurried, and it drives everyone slightly mad.

It gets filled anyway. The camps run on through the first weeks. The big trip that had to happen in July spills over. There are still vacation days to burn, a lake to reach, a deck to stain before the school buses run again. The calendar is a standing invitation to schedule something, and August offers no excuse to stop. But the calendar does not rule August. It has pleasures that cannot be scheduled, and they have a way of turning up anyway.

The Fair Comes to Town

The fair is August's answer to the urge to do something. The fairgrounds sit on the edge of town, a few low buildings around a grandstand, and for its stretch of August days it becomes a small city of light. The midway goes up in an afternoon — scaffold and cable and the particular clank of rides being assembled by men who do this in a different town every week. By evening the lights are on, hanging in the humid dark the way lights only hang in August, each bulb wrapped in a soft halo, the whole midway a warm haze of yellow and red.

The livestock barns are the heart of it. The concrete aisles smell of shavings and hay dust and all the stubborn good smell of animals, and the fans blow it straight into the face of every person walking the rows. Kids in stiff new jeans stand next to a steer or a hog with a show stick and a sponge, and a judge in a straw hat moves down the line. Somewhere a loudspeaker crackles — a lost child's name, a livestock class called to the ring — and nobody minds the crackle, because it is the sound of the thing itself.

The food booths fry everything that will hold still. The air at that end of the grounds is grease and powdered sugar and the sweet burnt smell of roasting corn. People walk with paper baskets tilted in their hands, talking with their mouths full, meeting people they have not seen since last August. The fair is where a county remakes itself as a crowd. Strangers stand together at the rail of the grandstand. The heat is part of the contract. So is the hour when everyone is finally tired and sugared out, and the rides slow, and the lights stay on for the clean-up crews and the last few couples on the benches.

Nobody goes to the fair to get something done. That is the point of it. The rides go nowhere. The judging decides nothing that will matter tomorrow. And yet for one August week the whole town agrees to stand in the heat, shoulder to shoulder, and call it a good time. That agreement is the month in miniature.

The Table Bends Under It

The garden peaks in August, and the kitchen enters its season of steam. Tomatoes come in faster than they can be eaten. They sit in bowls on the counters and windowsills, in the paper bags the neighbor left on the porch with a note that said "these are getting away from me." The sweet corn is in at the roadside stand, which is a card table, a plastic bucket, a coffee can of dollar bills, and a sign scrawled in marker. The basil has become a thicket. The okra asks to be picked every day.

Then the canning begins. The jars come down from the basement shelves. The big pot comes out from under the counter. For a week the kitchen smells of vinegar and dill and the sweet steam of tomatoes reducing. The cook of the house stands at the sink, passing jars from rinse water to boiling water, wiping rims with a clean towel, listening for the soft pop of the lids. The tomatoes line up on the counter in their red rows and then disappear into the pantry. The green beans follow. The bread-and-butter pickles follow them.

There is a satisfaction in putting August into jars that no trip to the store can imitate. It is work, but it is the good kind, done with other people — a cousin at the sink, a child sent out to pick the beans, the radio on in the window. August abundance hands itself over to whoever shows up to receive it.

At night the table holds the proof of the month. A platter of tomatoes sliced thick, salted, peppered. Corn in a bowl, still steaming, each ear buttered at the table. Cucumbers from the vine in vinegar. People eat slowly because it is too hot to eat fast, and they talk about nothing, and the meal runs longer than it should. August cooks do not need to try.

The Whole Argument of August

The sky gives the month its best hour. The meteor shower has run in August for as long as anyone has kept track, and on a clear night, away from the town lights, the shooting stars come one or two at a time, and then a cluster, and there is a rhythm to watching that has no purpose at all. A blanket on a lawn. A few people who agreed to stay up. The crickets again. A dog barking a mile off. No one keeps count. It is the opposite of a list.

The lake is an August thing too. The water has been warming since June, and by mid-August the top few feet have reached one perfect temperature, warm enough that every swim feels like returning. This is when the lake gets used — the weekday evenings after supper, the whole family at the end of the dock. The water slaps the hulls. The light lies flat and yellow along the far shore. The thought of September has not yet arrived, but it will soon enough.

Already the signs are up. In the big stores, the front aisles have filled with notebooks, glue sticks, backpacks, stacked in August heat that has not nodded at fall for a single day. The school will take its building back after Labor Day. The yellow buses sit in their row, patient. The month pretends not to notice, and the pretending is part of the pleasure.

No one is required to do anything in August. It has no holiday, no obligation. The rest of the year is spent running ahead. There will be time in September to be useful. August is the short season of stopping — on a porch, at a fair, on the flat warm lake, in the steam of a canning kitchen.