June and the stuff of dreams

Mountain laurel flowers hover in pale drifts on last year’s growth. The house wren selects a new birdhouse and declares its satisfaction with song. Fireflies dance in the high grass and high in the branches of trees. An old snapping turtle, moss-backed and ponderous, heaves up out of the swamp, seeking a good bank of gravel in which to deposit her eggs. Thunder rolls in with the steady night rain. I will smell the wet grass tomorrow in morning sunshine.

“June is bustin’ out all over,” says the song. It is like the swollen brook that spills over into wet meadows as it rises. It fills in the gaps between the starter plants in my garden with weeds as well as vegetables. It darts like swallows and bursts like warm, ripe strawberries on the tongue.

The nights are still cool and the days not yet heavy with heat. My thoughts turn to garden mint and limes. I watch the farmers markets start to showcase local produce as well as products. 

All the children, including my own, know almost to the hour the time that remains before summer vacation. My childhood summers were spent at the shore, months on end with extended family, and gloriously unscheduled. No one I know in my generation does summer vacation like that anymore. My children get a week with their first and second cousins, though, at my grandparents place on the bay, forging their own memories and close connections.

 “Cousins Week” is also known in our family as Bedlam by the Sea, and it happens in August. Well before then, the laurel will have lost its bloom, the strawberries given way to stone fruits and the first red tomatoes. June is all about expectancy and settling in. Never mind the mosquitoes and washouts and weather that fails to conform to expectations. It is summertime, as another song goes, “and the livin’ is easy.”

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