Tea, Flowers, and the Essence of Summer

On Saturday, my husband bought me a tin of tea - ‘Hot Cinnamon Sunset’. It’s spicy, sweet, and cozy on these moonlit summer nights. I’m discovering energy reserves that don’t depend on coffee, but my mind is still in the hazy, half-focused light of summer - undirected and lazy.

I’ve got flowers in the house - fading pink lilies; cosmos, daisies, and bee balm on the altar; and undying plastic petals on the flower ‘lei’ a nice boy gave to Yarrow at a Mexican restaurant. Today and yesterday are cool. It’s comfortable after a week of steamy days, but the constant rain this morning is making it hard to appreciate. I’ve a lovely new recipe for Blueberry Maple Corn Cake, and blueberries all over the yard, just waiting to be picked and popped into a cake, but the rain is too heavy to go picking, and the air is too damp to bake well. Maybe tomorrow will be clear enough. Maybe I’ll have cake with tea in the afternoon sunlight.

Last night, when it was still dry, I took my tea out to the yard where torches kept the bugs away and the heavy yellow moon peeked out between clouds and trees. Yarrow dozed to her father’s guitar, and birds sang in the trees. Nothing feels more like summer to me than that.

Direction on Moonless Nights

 

The moon and I are old friends. Especially when she waxes,near to full, and ringed with light. I’ve been lonely - looking up to the sky these past weeks - seeing only darkness. We missed The Biggest Moon in June thanks to some late afternoon storms that never left. I am resenting this tendency our earth has now of giving Maine a rainy season in June, when I’m desperate for sunny days and starry nights. It’s a small burden, I know, we have no fires, no 100 degree heat waves; only drowning gardens and seasonal affective disorder in one of our few warm months. 

 

As much as I’m looking forward to winter - truly, I am! - I’m looking forward to true summer as well. I live in the future, in potentials. I live in hope that a nice sunny weekend with have us finishing up projects, will find me throwing before an open window - stocking up for an autumn firing, with tomatoes ripening on the vine and roses bursting into bloom. Will leave me, late Sunday night, writing under a bright moon in the garden outside my door. Moonless, I can do little but wait - I have no compass, no friendly guide. I sit and wait and wonder - could I be doing more?

Looking Forward

There is a lot I need to be doing. Autumn is a busy season for us. I have the stove on this morning, a long list of “Things to Do”, and a mug of hot tea sitting just out of Petka’s reach. I’ve already fed the animals, prepared for the code-enforcer’s visit by emphasizing the ‘shed’ aspects of the kitchen building, checked my e-mails, and said the angelus. There is so much more to do, but I like to guard my early mornings. They’re comfortable, slow.

 

I write best in autumn, in the snatches of time between harvest fairs, canning, winter preparations and long leafy strolls. I have a small stack of autumn poems already awaiting editing. Almost all my poems are autumn poems. But today, now that this lovely, slow early morning is ended, I won’t have much time to write, I have the code man, the road, the fence, and dinner to deal with. But night is the best for writing anyway, so I can’t complain.

Night Noises

    Last night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed listening to the family’s sleep sounds: my husband’s calm breathing, Yarrow’s nightime chatter, and Luba’s neurotic sighs. Outside, I could hear the pig’s snoring, and occasional soft clucking from the chicken coop. Farther away, I heard voices speaking in the woods. The forest carries sound well. I can hear chainsaws worked a long way off, hear the neighbor’s cows about a mile off, and day or night, I can hear the trucks go by down on the main road. But the night-voices are new to me, and I’d rather they weren’t out there. I think it’s someone’s television, maybe our lonely neighbor has been staying up late these days, or maybe the trucker’s wife is watching the long nights go by alone. But sometimes the sound seems to be coming from the deep part of the woods, where we have no neighbors. I imagine a collection of tramps tenting out there, with their little dog and a small cook-fire. They become so real to me that I begin to worry about them facing the winter out among the trees and wonder if they have enough blankets; but then the sound changes, the channel’s been switched and I can hear new voices and music. It’s a television, I abandon my tramps to the wilds of Maine and let my mind drift back to comfortable old worries.

   When I had finally settled in, I heard a bird die. A small bird, right behind the house. I feel asleep dreaming of hunters, grateful I was not alone.