The Ides of August

The last week all those collective losses since the equinox have added up to a sudden tilt in time. Daylight yawns, stretches and slowly rolls up over the neighbor’s roofline into our side windows after my alarm has gone off--not before. And with the shrinking photoperiod, go the nightly lows. Just in the last few days the bedroom is nippy in the wee hours without the hard work and purr of the ceiling fan. And after months of mid and high 60s, yesterday morning started at a crisp tart 57. But the afternoons are still emphatically in the hands of summer: it was a hundred and six by early evening. No wonder that the exuberance of early spring seems so far away. That’s a walloping 50-degree spread for life forms that can’t do a whole lot to maintain a semblance of thermal equilibrium. No wonder the parsley, Echinacea, and thready second-blush Jupiter’s Beard blossoms look slightly grim.And after 20 minutes in traffic in my old beater car (no AC), windows open, sun beating down, I’m puffing and sweating myself.