There is certainly a light in August. It's so wonderful and profoundly sad. There is no time of year like August, when everything is in its prime before the inevitable lonely winds of fall sweep from the northwest, the mysterious north, and the acrid smokefires start to burn. I've been sick. Lying on Sunday in an allergy pill stupor, my big bloated medicinehead floating in and out of consciousness, I looked out on the almost darkness, the light of August. If you could contain that colour, I would paint everything. Friends would walk into my house and burst into tears. It's a sadness so deep that it's not really a sadness. For me, it's got something to do with lost connections. There is something so primal in that August light that you ache because of it, a happiness and sadness too great for the feeble human mind to absorb.
I stood on the porch on Sunday I think, dehydrated and hot, looking out to the west. The winds were picking up, promising the storm that never came, ceaseless flashing, the crickets like jinglebells from the rank weeds by the smokehouse, new-awakened Katydids, sporadic and unsure, the first splattery drops of rain.
Fall is safe, fall is friendly, August is not, and that's why it is so beautiful. It gets hot and still and cauldronlike and the humidity hangs like winding sheets, the rains stop coming until the fronts move in and storms erupt, savagely, cleansing the air. And then the pattern is repeated. And there is always that sunset light, that light in August, the clouds that puff up on the horizon in drastic relief and make me think of the Field of Dreams with Adam or the eastern seaboard with Sarah or the sandbox with Brian and Joy, the calls of the neighborhood...Cindy, dinner! or more faintly, the hammering, the calls of ghosts from Krantz's Field, all-e-all-e-ox-en-free, the crickets like jinglebells, summer an endless parade of dirt and sun and campfires and long evenings that fade slowly into that wraithlike half-light. It is the most intense time of the year, my favorite time of the year.

I am:
About to student teach
Almost done with the novel
Going to the fair tomorrow
Planning
Going hiking at an awesome county park tonight
Finished.

I paint my toenails, everything. I'm silly. They call me rubberneck.

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