Around ten days before July 4th, our backyard is electric with lightning bugs. They strobe in a glittering wall from the high grass to the top of the sixty foot tall trees. Some float along the creek bank and under the sweeping branches. Walking through it is like entering a magical passageway. You can’t take a picture of it, or a video of it. You have to witness it to understand the magnitude.
The daylight is so long during this brief and beautiful period that I need to stay up later to see them at their maximum density. I have never experienced this anywhere, and I make a point to enjoy it at least once. As Independence Day passes, the lights go out, and I’ll have to wait another year for them to return.
And then, on July 6th, there are giant Halloween decorations on display against the backdrop of the patio furniture.
Summer in Ohio is a rapidly depleting commodity. We jam pack every weekend with something, usually outdoors, even if it’s to have dinner on a patio, because it will be over soon. We take our camper out every other weekend or so, since there are only five good months to camp here. It’s a race against the inevitable winter ahead. The abrupt darkness. The endless gray. Blistering cold, coats and hats, general grumpiness and malaise. Retail establishments seem to remind us earlier and earlier that this is temporary, and the next thing is coming, and look, it’s already here.
The signs start to creep in before you’ve eaten your first fourth of July hot dog. Soap dispensers, conspicuously orange and red, appear on displays between the aisles in the grocery store. Summer apparel, attire, décor all dwindles into a depleted clearance rack. Try to find a swimsuit in August. You can’t. You won’t. Much like you can’t find a pumpkin after October second.
While those of us with limited nice weather sit on a boat or at a campfire or lounge in a pool, the school supply containers arrive. A gentle reminder: it’s over soon. Then come the Octoberfest beers, the cinnamon apple candles, the mysteriously fall flavored cereals and snacks. Pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice in everything and anything and some things that should not taste like nutmeg.
It’s still August, I tell myself as the garden center plants turn yellow. It’s still August, I cry as ads for sweater weather start popping up. It’s still August, I scream as the shelves are wiped clean for this year’s round of plastic skulls and ghosts. A Spirit Halloween crawls out of the grave of a closed Party City. And then, usually on the hottest day in August, the crown princess of fall debuts. The pumpkin spice latte.
Every year, as retail reminders creep further back into an already short span, my sense of time skews. Even the fall, a gorgeous and delicious season in northeastern Ohio, overstays its welcome. By September 30th, Santa is staring at a 10-foot skeleton from across the aisle at Lowe’s, the sinister laughs mixing with the ho-ho-hos.
On a lazy paddle on the kayak this summer I found myself thinking about how I could capture the same feeling of release and reset during the bleak winter. How can I still appreciate nature with forty-seven layers on, when the weather and sunlight dictate my willingness to venture outside? How can I still pause for a moment like that when I haven’t seen the sun since October and my skin is dry and my face is wind burnt and I want to melt into the couch? It’s hard to accept that this is all temporary, even harder when our material-driven society rushes us into it and insists we buy more crap for the next thing and the next. Never pause for a second, always accelerate through it.
August is a strange month. Orange but not fall. Green but not fresh. Worn but not weary. I’m not ready for it to give way to September, and harvest, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas and Valentine’s Day and the dullest sixty days of cabin fever known as March and April. Everything will restart, like it always does. I don’t want winter to come, but it has to, so this year I’ll try to be thoughtful about it when it does and enjoy the last fresh squeeze of summer while it’s still here.
K E Hubbard 
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