The August of my life

I am in the August of life, that broad stretch of middle age where the vigor of spring is still a recent memory and the scudding clouds of winter lie just beyond the horizon. 

There are some tatters and holes in my green leaves, but they still retain their ability to process the chlorophyll I need from the summer sun. It is a time of maturation, wine in the cask, a broad river that flows steadily through the lowlands on its way to the sea. It is a time that builds character, a polish and patina gained from long use and steady service.

My children feel the rush of time as the weeks slip relentlessly to what they conceive to be the end of the sweet days of summer and the return to school. I know that autumn holds a few golden weeks of its own, after the crowds have gone, while the migrants collect and spread their wings southward. 

Time moves in both directions for me, remembering when I could hold my child in the crook of my arm, and my own days of sun-bronzed youth, but also seeing the braided paths that lie ahead, some of which I have yet to travel.

August shows me where my crops have failed or brought forth their bounty. It raises questions about what I would do differently next time, and what I would pass on as advice to others. It reminds me that some of the best adventures are still to come, even as I and all things change from what we once were.

This is a time of life when tempests may churn, confronting the gyre of Charybdis or a lump beneath the skin. It is a time when we lose our elders and find ourselves replacing them. We are aware of our mortality, walking in the knowledge that life is a gift and a burden both, and time is what we make of it. 

Whether we then, as with Tennyson’s Ulysses, “drink life to the lees,” or wonder as with J. Alfred Prufrock if we “dare to disturb the Universe,” is the point on which August turns. And there are many seasons in a life well lived, and who is to say when the cycle is complete?

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.