Summertime Daydreaming

     Ahh, the perennial sounds of a summer morning. Windows open, birds singing, the faint sound of a June breeze, and perhaps a lawnmower far off somewhere. Even with eyes closed, you can feel what lies ahead today. These are timeless sounds that bring to mind our family kitchen on a June morning in 1967. My mother sets a cut up cantaloupe melon on the breakfast table. The pool filter hums outside the back door and the day contains endless possibilities for a child of eight.
     Summer evening sounds are different, more subdued. There might still be the distant sound of a lawnmower, but it carries differently in the evening air. The birdsong is different, too. The day is done, dinner is put away, and the faint light of dusk has only just settled at nine o'clock. The fireflies are blinking on the grass and perhaps I should get a jar, but I hate to step away to go inside and find one. Lazy, that's what I am and that's what these days should be.
     I have purposed to allow myself an empty calendar of business for this first week of vacation. Too many things will crowd it soon enough. I've allowed the dust to settle on the furniture and barely kept up with the laundry. Instead, I've happily hooked rugs, gone out to an antique shop, watched a movie smack dab in the middle of the afternoon, read a book or two, and lazily watered the garden. I walked up the hill to visit Mrs. Cahoon and I spent a pleasant Thursday with Audrey here for a visit.
    She and I took a walk up the dirt road and onto a cart track through the Cahoon's field to see where they're logging in the woods. We've been hearing the sound of mighty trees falling and chainsaws working all day long. We see the tractor trailers with the huge logs rumbling out from the road behind us. Audrey is sad to see the woods are gone. She used to ride her horse back here and she recalls the time when she startled a wild turkey with a flock of chicks. She was thrown from her horse and the chicks scrambled up and all over her. It is a fond memory and she smiles when she tells it. She shows me one stump that might have been one hundred years old. It's quite an ugly scene today. The land looks devastated and barren. We don't know if this will be planted anew or left to seed over in scrub. Eventually, in forty or fifty years, it may be shaded and pretty again. We walk back home, noting the flattened grass where the deer bed down at night and the turkey droppings on the path. : )
     The temperatures are rising and so is the humidity. It means we will close the windows for a spell, turn on the AC, and put a barrier between the inside and the outside. I hate to do it, but I hate the humidity even more. I'll spend the mornings and evenings outside and maybe read on the porch a little bit in between. Steve will sit out on the porch very late into the evening, listening to the sounds of a summer night.. Last night he came in and described to me a sound he heard. I guessed perhaps it was a fox. We may never know but, we'll try and listen for it again.