July

It is July and the sun is sitting heavy on my shoulders, calling up the moisture from the earth so the air is thick and sticky.  In the dappled shade it is delightful if you have nothing much to do but bathe in the heat and turn your face to the occasional ruffle of breeze like a wind-chime in a window.  The sun makes all the colours shine like a bride on her wedding day and lights even the shade so there are no secrets.  No secrets and no wish to run and tell for languor settles on us all. 

The lavatera, the bush mallow, has so many pink-striped flowers it is like a garden fete, loud and over-dressed in the corner.  The grass, though, is fading, bleaching to brown, awaiting the rain when it will rejuvenate like a magician’s trick.  There are flowers snuggling near the surface that erupt each time after mowing, white clover and daisies, yellow buttercups and episcopal purple self-heal.  They have gone from the wild garden, subsumed by the unmown grass.  It requires tending to yield the wild flowers that one wants!

So much to do now it is sun-time and the garden has overgrown itself and the dust inside can no longer hide.  So much to do, but my energy and purpose have watered away and I await their return like a flower open and ready for a busy bee but touched instead by a butterfly’s dancing tease.  Do bees feel the heat?  I passed a hebe so full of flowers you could hear the buzz of the bees a pavement away. 

Summer is a curious season.  All year long I build towards it, lighting fires through the dark of winter and celebrating the advances of spring, but when it arrives it can feel empty.  Like bringing up my daughter, eighteen years of nurture building to the climax of this time, of leaving school and being ready for the big, wide world, but instead of achievement I feel the loss, loss of routine and role, and soon loss of her presence as she starts her own journey.   

Skin smells sweet in the sun if you catch it before it coats itself with sweat and starts to run.  And I will find the ways of the season as I slow in time with the sun’s call.