I often rode through the hours of evening and night along the country roads, taking pleasure in the night, in the nocturnal sounds so common to the summer evenings — the lowing of cattle, the barking of dogs, the crying of whippoorwills and killdeers, the calling of frogs, the stridulations of katydids and crickets — and in the perfumes of the darkened countryside — the fragrance of clover and cut hay, the pungence of mare’s tails and other weeds, the cool exhalation of deep woods, and that strangely fertile musk of corn, of leaves as well as of bloom, which pervades the air in midsummer and holds to it for weeks.
August Derleth
Sunri
se/set: 5:16/8:04
Day’s Length: 14 hours 48 minutes
Average High/Low: 85/64
Average Temperature: 75
Record High: 103 – 1936
Record Low: 49 – 1898
Weather
Skies are totally overcast 30 percent of the time, and rain can be expected five years in ten. The temperature distribution is usually identical to that of the 11th: mostly 80s and 90s with a slight chance of 70s. Lows in the 50s, however, come twice as often as on the 11th, but that still only means that ten to 15 percent of the nights are so cool.
Natural Calendar
Rose of Sharon Season flowers in the hedgerows, Phlox Season in the gardens. Mulberry Blooming Season and Black Raspberry Season come to an end. Thistledown Season and Milkweed Pod Season deepen along the roadsides. Cicada Song Season swells; Giant Green June Beetle Season comes now, too. Hosta, Liatris and Obedient Plant Blooming Seasons take over the dooryards. Japanese Beetle Season peaks in the roses, the ferns and the soybeans. Leafturn begins now in the undergrowth. Depending on the year, buckeye foliage can be badly rusted, and leafminers often turn the locust leaves brown. Along the roadsides, hemlock, parsnips, and many dock plants are withered and brittle. June’s clovers and grasses are past their prime.
Daybook
1983: First rose of Sharon blooms. First field corn is tasseling. Jeff’s early sweet corn is almost ready to eat.
1988: First red Virginia creeper seen. A few buckeye leaves rusted. Sitting in the yard, I saw a maple or elm leaf flutter to the ground every few minutes. At the swamp, Joe Pye weed is heading. River very low, carp wallowing in the shallows. One huge creature seen, about five feet long, like a white shadow in the water. Was it a trick of the sunlight or one of Vern Hogans’ legendary Little Miami muskies? Walking at night, I found a huge cecropia moth with a six-inch wingspan killed on Limestone Street.
1989: First hosta blooms in the yard. No cicadas yet. Tall cactus in full bloom in the greenhouse. A few last black raspberries.
1990: To Wisconsin: The habitat is stable (like that of Yellow Springs) until about 30 miles south of Rockford, Illinois, and then it becomes earlier and richer. June’s yellow sweet clover, already to seed in Yellow Springs, is still bright there. Golden parsnips are still in full bloom, and the hills are a softer green, the color of the first week of Early Summer, not the color of southern Ohio Deep Summer that I left. A promise of autumn despite the other regressions in time: the first goldenrod is open just south of the Wisconsin border.
1995: Black walnuts, maybe three-fourths full size, found on the sidewalk in front of Nate’s house.
1996: First cicadas heard today.
1997: No cicadas yet. Pond finished today, waterfall set up. The water striders and diving beetles survived the rainwater being drained out. Sitting in the yard and listening to the waterfall, I noticed the primroses were completely done for the year. Mallow still full bloom, but the leaves of one of the plants was yellowing. Although showy coneflowers are flowering around town, ours are still just budding. The first phlox are budding along the north garden, but the plants have been so weakened by disease, they may not make it through the summer. Powdery mildew has already killed the south garden’s phlox. Picked a nice bowl of raspberries this morning, but there won’t be many more.
2000: Cardinal song at 4:32 a.m., sky a little overcast. A few more calls, then the morning becomes silent, the chorus having faded away over the past weeks.
2003: Still no cicadas. Most of the cornfields still not tasseling. We visited a daylily farm today, learned how to propagate them and cross-breed them. All the lilies were in full bloom there and at another lily outlet; and at home, most of the daylilies continue to come in, some for the first time.
2005: Caring for the zinnias, I lightly cultivate the soil close to their roots, gently cut the bindweed that has curled around their stems. Everything here seems the same as it was last year and the year before: the shape of the garden, the plantings, the bold colors now of August.
As I work, I think about my mother’s petunias and the rhubarb in the back yard in Marshfield, Wisconsin, and the raspberry patch from which I gathered gallons of berries. I think about Jeanie’s rose garden and her lilies (so many of which are blooming now).
I have been reading Hunger Mountain by David Hinton. The essays in the book follow his daily walks in the mountain landscape where he lives. On his excursions, he meditates on the ancient Chinese poetry which he has spent his life translating. He finds consolation not only in the Taoist themes of the poems but even in the simple, open grammar of their composition.
I go from zinnias to raspberries to roses to lilies to the mountain of Taoist suggestions. One of the benefits of my meditation practice is to realize how rich my scattered mind can be. In what is sometimes called “monkey mind,” a state in which thoughts continue to pour through consciousness, I find a wealth of threads.
Of course, the garden is really not the same as it was last year. I sketch it together with my disconnected recollections, fill in brief empty spaces with associations – with holding hands, on the beach of Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia, with the branches of the honeysuckles in which I hunted my first birds, with coloration of regrets and acceptance, with one of the plans for next spring: seeding greater celandine to fill the empty seasons between daffodils and tulips.
2007: Another red admiral and tiger swallowtail seen today. Seems like more red admirals than in previous years.
2008: Most lilies are approaching their peak now in the garden, and the first of the Stargazer Orientals opened overnight. A male grackle was feeding a fledgling under the bird feeder while we ate lunch in the early afternoon. No regular cicada calls yet. A small burst of yellow leaves fell suddenly from the high locusts at 2:15.
2009: Quiet this morning at 4:45 except for doves. Chicory just opening at about 7:00. At the feeder after breakfast, four baby sparrows being fed by their parents. No cicadas yet.
2010: Monk, the cat, was walking around this noon with a tiny baby bird in its mouth; it must have fallen out of the nest in this morning’s thunderstorm. I took it – still alive – out and put it back under the honeysuckle bushes. Monk had another young bird last night. First katydid of the season heard tonight at 9:50.
2011: Steady cardinal calls from the time I got up at 4:40 until a little after 5:00. Some crow or grackle “scrawing” through the morning, but no birds singing this evening when I walked Bella. All of the standard mid-season hostas (dark leaves and purple flowers) are in full bloom throughout town. Three zinnias from the packages planted in the first week of May are opening, and the dahlias put in during the same period are also starting to produce blossoms.
2012: Tat reports from Madison a decline in morning birdsong. Here in Yellow Springs, most of the red monarda has completed blooming. Astilbe foliage withering in the heat, flowers long brown. Hummingbirds constantly at the feeder, but the sparrows are slow to feed today, and there are no fledglings with the flock. All the cornfields fully tasseled, many ears silking. Twenty-three lily plants in bloom today, the peak completely past, no longer any of the larger clumps with large numbers of blooms. Giant swallowtail, Eastern black swallowtail and a small spicebush today at the butterfly bush. Rudebeckia speciosa opened today, beginning the slow three-week trek to Late Summer. Joe Pye weed buds have developed their violet color, and stonecrop blushing at the corner of Limestone and Stafford Streets.
2013: Thirty-three lilies in bloom this morning, down five from yesterday. So few butterflies. “Indomitable Spirit” hydrangea flowers have faded quickly from pink to brown.
2014: Thirty-seven lilies in bloom today, numbers still increasing, and density of blooms. Webworm web noticed in the honeysuckles this morning. And the first silver-spotted skipper. Peggy’s Limelight hydrangea has many green bud clusters, one of them open and white On the east side of my house a small (maybe an inch long), black moth, wings closed, with white, oblong markings, gone before I could photograph it. Seems like it would be an alypia or some sort of tiger moth, maybe a Parasemia plantaginis. And I found it near one of its favorites, the Rumex obtusifolius – the broad-leaf dock that I don’t seem to be able to get rid of on that side of the house.
2015: Sudden drop in the number of lily plants in bloom: only forty today – versus sixty yesterday! In the Asiatic lily bed, two tiger lily plants in bloom. I haven’t tracked them well at all.
2016: From Yellow Springs to Lanesboro, Minnesota (southeastern Minnesota): all the way north, similar Deep Summer vegetation. Corn tasselling, wheat fields creamy tan and uncut above Bloomington, Illinois. Red-winged blackbirds still nesting in vegetation in pastures and in the crops bordering the highway. From Ohio into Minnesota, thistledown spreading along the fencerows. In southern Wisconsin, the peak of prairie blossoms with yarrow, gray-headed coneflowers, small-flowered knapweed, rudbeckia, Queen Anne’s lace and trefoil (ubiquitous) The only anomaly was the full bloom of parsnips from Rockford north all the way into central Wisconsin.
2017: One hundred seventy-five lily blossoms today (includes six ditch-like lilies), almost twice as many as yesterday in another increase, and despite the deer! From Madison, Wisconsin, Maggie sends photos of gray-headed coneflower, purple coneflower, violet monarda, black-eyed Susan and daisy clumps in the forest preserve near her house, also two adult turkeys with numerous fledglings the size of chickens, and an adult deer with a fawn about the size as the one I saw in my yard yesterday.
2018: One hundred thirty lilies in all this morning. Sycamore bark all over the ground at the Indian Mound.
This evening, I was walking west down Limestone Street, and I could see Venus straight ahead of me, a deep red-orange marker in the sky in the very last of sundown over Dayton.
I looked up and around, trying to find the Big Dipper and the Summer Triangle, prominent stars of a July night. I could see Jupiter in the south to my left, but haze or high clouds kept the constellations hidden. The moon, new and dark, had set an hour or so earlier, and I was alone with the planets.
Not that I was really alone, surrounded by houses, cars going by over on Dayton Street, but I felt comforted by the presence of Venus and Jupiter, and I wondered why that was.
Had I needed to find my way in a wilderness, they might have been of some help, but I knew where I was and where I was going, Maybe they were something like lighthouse beacons, I thought, marking safety and home. I was not at sea, or so I believed, but it seemed they offered a kind of comfort of context, as though they were guides, companions in a confused space or time, as though they promised that the end of some trip or other was at an end.
2019: One hundred eighty day lilies (down over 40 from yesterday’s count), 26 ditch lily blossoms (down from 40) today. One monarch on the phlox, one red admiral in love with the zinnias, one yellow tiger swallowtail along High Street. In the alley, many full-size black walnuts on the ground. The grackles made a scrawing fuss when Monk the cat walked under their trees. At Ellis Pond, the elderberry flowers have become green berries. The panicled dogwoods and pokeweeds have green berries, too. No katydids heard after dark.
2020: Lily count: 218 day lily, 33 ditch lily and three Asiatic lily blossoms. Yellow leaves fall sporadically from the peach and the sweet cherry tree.
Journal: Summer Mountain
In his book, Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane writes about the role of the imagination in a person’s approach to space and place. The mountains people climb, he writes, must first exist and be conquered in their minds.
Before it became fashionable to climb mountains, few people thought it worth the trouble. Then, thanks to Romanticism’s fascination with the sublime, people began to fantasize about what Jean Jacques Rousseau called “a kind of supernatural beauty in these mountainous prospects which charms both the senses and the minds into a forgetfulness of oneself and of everything in the world.”
When he actually climbed mountains, Macfarlane discovered “that the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountains one climbs.” The real mountains are “matters of hard, steep rock and freezing snow…of vertigo…of hypertension, nausea and frostbite.”
But is it true that in order to experience summer I have to imagine it first? In the middle of July, the question seems absurd. Why should I try to imagine what is right here all around me?
In the gray and cold of February, the question is less frivolous. Then, anticipation creates a different, more welcome summer, in which the heat and humidity are not oppressive, in which the garden is always beautiful and productive, and all the good summers of the past join in memory.
Then, I climb the mountain, and July becomes not only all the things I perceive and feel in July days, but also my reaction to the way I had imagined things might be, and how I feel and how I thought I might feel or wanted to feel finally reaching the summit of the highest tide of the year.
If I am disappointed, no matter. Summer Mountain lies before me, just a few seasons away. If I let my mind soar, I might imagine Rousseau’s “supernatural beauty” that waits for me next year.