For Summer People

      For everything there is a season ...a time to be born ... a time to plant ... 
                                                                                            Ecclesiastes 3:2

      Right on schedule, the little tree by the front door is turning from red to green. We're told it's a dwarf red maple, but I've never looked that up.  I don't need to know the kind of thing the experts would explain. I know that our little herald changes every year because something elemental is going on between the earth and the air. That's enough for me.
      The azaleas, too, are settling in for summer. They had a rough spring. The weather was too soon warm and then too late cold. The neighbors up the hill had bright blossoms nonetheless. But our plants are in a low spot and couldn't soldier through. Their blossoms were few and quickly dead. Maybe next year.
      If seasons of nature are matched by seasons of the mind, the summer season is my best. I learned to love it as a boy, when we lived for a time with my grandparents on their patch of farm land. I was too young for farm work and too old to need watching. For me, shirtless, shoeless freedom was the hallmark of  summer days. Christian liturgical calendars call them "ordinary time" -- the span between the crescendo of Easter and the promise of Advent. The term has always seemed odd to me. A bit of a flat note. Maybe none of those old calendar-makers ever laid on his back to sky-gaze through the lacework of a honeysuckle thicket.
       My shirtless, shoeless days are gone, but summertime still features special joys -- and chores. I keep a close eye on those azaleas. They gave me fits for years. They refused to bloom. They refused even to maintain a proper demeanor.   The dictionary has a word for it: Tatterdemalion -- A person dressed in tattered clothing. A ragamuffin.  Until I found the right ways of care and feeding, our azaleas were tatterdemalions.
      We had a bit of struggle with the flowers, too. We plant them in the ground around the driveway light, and in the baskets hanging from the back deck rail.  It took a while to find a kind the deer wouldn't eat. They come mostly at night, although on the peak heat days of high summer we may see them taking our backyard shade. They stare at our windows, and if we are careful to do no more than stare back, they do not startle.
     We did find the right flowers. The experts call them Pentas. We ordinary folk call them Starflowers. The deer don't like them, but the hummingbird does, and so they serve us well all around.
       

     ... a time to die ...  and a time to pluck up what is planted; 
                                                                       Ecclesiastes 3:2

     The flowers must come out in the fall, of course. They have their season, and seasons end. The azaleas -- which do bloom now, when the weather's right -- get a little extra snack as they begin setting their flower buds for the following spring. The days are milder, but they are shorter, too. It is a mixed thing for me, as I consider what's ahead.
     Those ancient calendar-makers may not have understood a little boy's country summers, but they knew a thing or two about seasons of the mind. As they organized  and named the days, they gave us festivals and wakes, too. They knew we needed both. They knew our inner sense that the cycle of the seasons amounts to more than changing weather.  Not only because of the cold do I dislike the stark, bare limbs of winter trees.
     But that's for later, and even then I will know a steadying thing. I will know that next year, right on schedule, the little tree by the front door will announce the arrival of a new summer. And that's enough for me.