Lazy August days lie at heart of summer
/The Boston Herald
Beverly Beckham
Natalie Babbitt created this day. Not intentionally. And not really. She simply pointed out in her wonderful children's book ``Tuck Everlasting'' that ``the first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless and hot.''
Maybe if she had written a similar metaphor about March I'd like that month a little better. But the truth is that long before I read Babbitt's words, not when I was a child but when my children were children, I knew that the first week of August was magic. It was the peak of summer, steamy every day and steamy every night, the ground like the burners on my mother's stove, never really cool, the earth and the pavement and even the floors indoors packed warm with the day's sun. And the air, indoors and out, thick and still always, even at night.
We had only fans to swirl it, not air conditioners to cool it. Not in our houses. Not in our cars. Not in our churches or the library or even Whitey's Bakery.
Only department stores were air-conditioned. Remicks in Quincy was the coldest - cold and clean and redolent with perfume. It was the place to step into on a hot August day.
The first week of August was filled with the hottest of days, with air you could see shimmering above the pavement of our driveways. With flies, there were so many of them, worn out by the heat, sticking to flypaper that hung everywhere. With kids AND their mothers running through sprinklers. With mosquitoes every night. And ice cream every day. With the steady chirp of crickets. With everyone's father not cutting the grass but collapsed on a chair in the parlor, and everyone's dog, not chasing cars, but collapsed in a hole full of cool earth under a tree.
The heat slowed us down and wound us up. We played under the street lights. We daydreamed in the shade. We hung out in our cellars where it was cool and damp and we made gimp bracelets and read comic books and sucked on Fireballs. And time - it's time for bed; it's time to set the table; it's time you cleaned your room; it's time you thought about what you need for school - not only stopped. It ceased to be.
The days were so hot they melted into one another, lazy days. Strange days, too, when hanging the laundry was no longer a chore but something we begged to do, because the sheets were cool in our hands and, hung on the line, they were like great white sails.
August is ``blank white dawns and glaring moons, and sunsets smeared with too much color,'' Babbitt wrote. And they were. And they are. And today, Aug. 1, is the beginning of these days.
They come and go so fast and it's easier to ignore them now. Most everything is air-conditioned. Plus we're not kids anymore.
But August still lulls. If you let it.
It's the peak of summer, hot and hazy and humid. And there's a stillness in the air, and a quiet under the traffic sounds that lets you hear birds singing and crickets chirping and children playing and the ice cream man's eternal song.
Right now we're on top of the Ferris wheel. And we've paused for a moment.
And it's a moment to be savored.
