Late Summer Markers

I know that by the calendar, we're only at midsummer--barely at midsummer, since the summer solstice was a month ago, and we've got two months until the autumnal equinox. 

But in terms of weather, it feels like late summer:  it's been hot for months, with no end in sight.  Our yards are getting crunchy, in this year of rainy season drought.

In terms of the school year, it's late summer:  one batch of my online students is weeks away from finishing.  Our public school teachers will report for work in a few weeks, with students not far behind them.  We only have a few weeks of summer left, according to the school year calendar.

On my way from work to week-end, I stopped at Total Wine.  The pumpkin beers are on the shelf.  If I went to the big box stores, I suspect I would be seeing displays of Halloween candy--Halloween is only 100 days away after all.

We went to Penn Dutch, a store that specializes in a variety of meats at cheap prices, and we stocked up the freezer as if our hurricane season is over.  If a hurricane comes in the next few weeks, we'll have a heck of a cook-out! 

Last night I made some barley with feta cheese to go with our lamb chops.  I thought back to when I had bought the barley, back near Memorial Day, when I had so many summer plans, like eating more lentils and barley and eating more melon.

There's still time to eat more melon, but this summer, like other summers, I find the act of cutting up the melons into chunks to make it easy to take to work--I find this chore overwhelming at times.

After dinner, we planted radishes.  In our strange South Florida growing season, it will soon be time to plant tomatoes, while the rest of the country plants their winter squashes and cabbages.

This morning, I have tried to return to good writing practices.  I scratched at my poetry notebook.  I have some ideas, but nothing came together.  I was taking some ideas from a past poem about the fibers of our existence and thinking about various fibers:  thread, spider webs, quilts, those rainbow rubber bands that kids use to weave long bands together.

I put the notebook aside with that familiar frustration of returning to metaphors that I worry I've already used to extinction, their usefulness gone because I overuse them.  This weariness, too, is a mark of late summer.  I'm ready for a cool breeze to reanimate my writing.  It may be many weeks away, and so, I trudge ahead.