The Dog Days of August

By the first week of August the dog has dug his hollow under the porch steps, and that is where he stays. The shade is the only honest thing left in the yard. The lawn is crackly underfoot; the tomatoes have split on the vine; the okra stands with its leaves shut tight, as if the sun had said something and everyone had agreed to let it talk.

This is the dog days. The phrase sounds like a joke about the dog, but the joke is older than the porch, older than the yard, older than the continent the yard is sitting on. August is the month the dog days do their worst work. It is also the month they finally let go.

The Days Under the Porch

The dog days open at the start of July, and by the time August turns the page they are in full possession. The old almanacs run them from the third of July to the eleventh of August—forty days in the belly of the heat. August gets the back half of the sentence, the part where the heat stops explaining itself and just sits there.

It is easy to read the wrong meaning into the phrase. The dog under the porch is not the point of the name. The point is everything else: the corn standing dead still by noon, every tassel and blade hanging straight down; the cotton opening its bolls in the hot afternoons; the pond going green and thick at the edges. The point is the sound, too. In late July the dog-day cicadas start up in the chestnuts and locusts, and through the whole of August they grind away at the same note from first light to last, a sound like a saw on a long stone. They are named for the days, and they keep the name honest.

Every farmhouse calendar has the dog days marked, a box drawn around the worst of the heat. The butter goes soft before breakfast. The flies find the screen doors. The garden keeps producing tomatoes and complaints, in equal measure. Out in the cornfield, August is the month the crop makes its final argument: either it set its ears in July, or it never will.

August is when the season sits down. The days are long yet, but they have lost their appetite. There is work that has to be done, and work that only a fool would start. The dog knows which is which. He has made his calculation—nose on his paws, one eye open—and the man who tries to beat him on the matter usually loses.

The Star With the Sun

The name comes down from the brightest star in the night sky, which spends August doing something stranger. Sirius—the Dog Star, the jewel at the nose of Canis Major, the hunter's larger dog—crosses the sky in daylight, invisible, riding with the sun.

The ancients knew it was there. They watched it rise ahead of the sun in the summer dawn, and they understood the arrangement as cause and effect. In Egypt, Sirius came up before sunrise around the time the Nile began to climb, and the star was met with fear and ceremony: the holy star that brought the flood. In Greece, Hesiod told the farmer to stop his work when Sirius parched the head and the knees and the strength ran out of men. By the time of Rome the matter had a name—caniculares dies, the days of the dog—because the star belonged to the dog, and its temper fell on dogs first.

What the Romans believed about that star would make a fine fable if it were not a working theory of summer. When Sirius rose with the sun, they said, the sea boiled, the wine turned, and dogs went mad. The days were dangerous; the air added its own heat to the sun's; the water was unhealthy. The dog days were not a lazy stretch of the year. They were a sickness that a careful household moved through.

That is the part the modern phrase has sanded down. “Dog days” now is just an apology for being sluggish in July and August. But the old fear survives in the syllable count. The reason the season was named for a dog is that the dog was in the sky, and the sky was on fire.

A New Country, an Old Fever

The phrase crossed the Atlantic early, traveling in almanacs and farm ledgers, and it took to American ground like a native. In the old country the dog days had been a nuisance. In Virginia, the Carolinas, and the bottoms of the Ohio and the Mississippi, they were the season itself—weeks when the sun sat higher and the creeks ran warmer and the names from the old sky had to do more work.

The American dog days gathered up a country's worth of caution. Farmers would not put seed in the ground, for a thing planted in the dog days was said to come up crooked, or not at all. Children were kept from the swimming holes, because dog-day water was thought to be unwholesome—the old Roman suspicion of summer water, resettled on a new continent. A cut or a snakebite in the dog days was considered slow to heal; a mad-dog scare in August could clear a street. The fear was not always folklore. Rabies has its own seasons, and the dog days got the blame for the whole sad business.

Whether the dog days came wet or dry meant something, but what it meant depended on who was doing the telling, and every county's rhyme contradicted its neighbor's, and nobody minded. The point was never the prediction. The point was the calendar taking notice.

The days also went soft in the mouth, the way American speech tends to soften things. “Dog days” became a term for the doldrums, a way of saying that nothing worth doing has to be done this week. The man who would not work was said to have the dog days. The work itself, if it went badly, was dog-days work. Meanwhile the cicadas kept the old meaning in circulation. August afternoons in the eastern half of the country are walled in by that long buzz, and nobody who has heard it has to ask where the phrase came from.

When the Days Let Go

The almanac ends the dog days on the eleventh of August, and the date has a stubborn authority even when the thermometer ignores it. Something in the light turns around the middle of the month. The noons are still exactly what they were—white, heavy, unanswerable—but the evenings begin to let go. Sometime in the back half of August comes the first night that is actually cool, and it usually arrives unannounced, like a debt repaid by accident. The dog comes out from under the porch, walks the yard in the dusk, and stops to smell the air as if the air had said something new.

In the long view, the star kept its appointment, just late. The sky does not hold still for human calendars. In the two thousand years since Rome named the dog days, a slow drift has carried Sirius's rising with the sun away from the beginning of the season and toward its end—so that, by the time the almanac's dog days give out in August, the Dog Star is closer to actually riding with the sun than it was when the name was new. The heat and the story have been trying to agree ever since.

What the dog days leave behind is the rest of August, which is a different country. The evenings cool. The cicadas sound weary. The garden gives over to weeds and volunteer tomatoes, and the season starts to look forward instead of back. The phrase hangs on—people say “dog days” all the way through the month—but after the eleventh it is mostly habit, like a nickname that has outlived its reason.

August is the month the phrase finally makes sense. The dog under the porch knows more about it than the dictionary does. The days are too hot for work, the water is warm, the cicadas saw away until dusk, and up there in the blue, hidden in the light, the Dog Star comes up with the sun and the old name rides out the season on its back. Lazy as a dog, and ancient as one.

Photos: Stiller Beobachter, Purple Slog (CC BY 2.0); Leonora (Ellie) Enking (CC BY-SA 2.0)