Category: Summer
Dealing with Summertime Sadness
Summer has its own darkness. Thunderstorms, closed canopies, forests cast in shadow. Twilight woodlands where mushrooms bloom. For all its long hours of light, summer is a very literally dark time in my house. Built in the middle of a forested grove, every year my home becomes a deeply shaded cave during the summer months….
The Secret to a Beautiful Garden
I love gardening, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been easy for me. Historically, I’ve been ever-so-enthusiastic about planting, and not nearly as attentive to that whole pruning and weeding bit. In the past it’s been hard for me to cull the herd, to make decisions about who stays and who goes, and to…
Gift Yourself A Rainy Day
Normally, summertime in the mountains is marked by generous rainfall. With so much greenery, the earth here grows used to the daily drinks of thunderstorms. But recently we didn’t see a drop of rain for weeks on end. Every day was sunny, hot, and almost unbearably chipper. Each day of blue skies seemed to…
A Recipe for Late Summer Nourishment
Here in the mountains, the waning afternoon light has taken on an earth-warmed hue, like bronze poured over low banked coals. Already a few trees are beginning to fade to the color of ancient paper and there is an overwhelming sense that, even though the snapdragons continue to bloom, things are incrementally beginning to…
Dealing with Seasonal Overwhelm
The trees are deepening their green every day and the flowers are popping off in full symphonic bursts. The wild roses flutter snowlike down the hillside and between the birds, the bees, the peepers and the neighborhood kids there is music every hour of the day. It is a complete summer paradise. And here I…
Summer as a Season of Rest
Summer as a time of rest is almost unheard of around these parts. For all those that garden or homestead it can feel as though the tasks are never-ending. And even those who don’t tend the land seem to fill their coffers with well-intended parades of vacation, work projects, or pie making, but…
Thunderstorm Medicine
Like an anxious spike high on the thermometer, a hot summer day can hold a whole lot. The heaviness of the past, the humidity of future-tripping, the density of a too-tightly-packed schedule. It’s life, intensified, with everything being experienced at once. Like the sound of the cicadas rolled into one giant buzz or…
Allowing on a Late Summer Day
There is a specific slant to the late afternoon sun that floods my living room with a cast-iron butter of deeply heated light. It’s always that last stretch of sunshine that seems to glow the hottest. In the downward arch of day, the fever of collected sunshine gathers like a stove coil around the rim…