Long Days of Summer

“The garden looks as rumpled as clothes left in the dryer too long.”

June Masters Bacher

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Lazy summer days drone on with temps so hot you can barely stand up outside. One hundred degrees every day for weeks on end the sun beating down and a breeze of super-heated air.

Dust billows up from the heat dried roadbed when a pickup passes hauling a trailer of hay or a tractor trundles past.

The cicadas sing all day until your brain attempts to silence them. Grasshoppers as long as your thumb gnaw the tops of the canna lily leaves until they look like they’ve been beaten. The hoppers stick to the window screens and chew and chew.

The grass is crunchy underfoot and cooked to a golden brown. No lawnmower has been heard since the grass isn’t growing.

We soothe our dryness with ice creams, fresh peaches, cantaloupes and watermelon. The garden is full of weeds with nothing left to harvest but okra and hot peppers. For supper we slice vine-ripened tomatoes onto a white platter and sprinkle sparkly sugar on them.

We fill up wading pools for the grandkids so they can cool off playing in the water. We turn on the sprinkler so they can run and leap in the spray. We give them popsicles to slurp while perched on the porch swing.

The cicadas song has replaced the tree frogs chorus we heard in the rainy spring. An owl hoots from his perch above the nearly dry creek. The nighthawk voices his discontent.

The day drones on and on and no respite from the glaring sun comes until the sun sets. Then there is a slight drop in the temperature then but the worst of the heat stays on. A simple wisp of air clatters the wind-chime and is gone.

The sun goes down and the owls call once again from the creek. Bats swoop and dive and dip eating mosquitos to their fill. Cows bellow to their calves calling them to settle down at their hay-filled sides for the night.

Soon it is bedtime and with the darkness we settle down into our quiet spaces and find rest.

God makes the day and establishes the night. He makes the winter and the summer. He designed the short cold days and the elongated hot summer days. We wonder how and why. We may never know.

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It was You who set all the boundaries of the earth; You made both summer and winter.

Psalm 74:17

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