By James McGuire
Contributing columnist
July is winding down. A few days from now, we’ll turn the page and find ourselves in August—summer’s final full month.
We’re rounding the season’s backstretch. Yet it seems like only yesterday spring’s first wildflowers were just making their pastel splashes on a newly-green landscape.
Time indeed flies! Give it another thirty days, and by then, yellow goldenrods and the first purple blooms of asters and ironweed will be spattering local meadows.
I’m always a bit disquieted when I see those fields of purple and gold because I know their royal color combo heralds a conclusive phenological proclamation that autumn is now not all that far around the corner.
We’re in the midst of the dreaded Dog Days—a period the Greeks and Romans fearfully believed illness, unrest, and bad luck ruled. Water wells went bitter, wine soured. Sickness and disease ran rampant, men suffered burning fevers, hysterics, and were prone to lethargy and frenzies. Of course, the span’s namesake dogs went mad, snarling their way along the streets and savaging local villagers.
All this madness and mayhem —along with the heat and drought and fever—was believed to be caused by the rising of the bright star Sirius, Orion’s dog, in the balmy night sky.
Nowadays, we simply look upon the old Dog Days as summer’s hottest, and often driest, period. A lot of sweating, a bit of discomfort, but as long as you don’t tease your neighbor’s pit bull, you’re not too apt to get bit.
July has been called “summer’s heart.” And that’s certainly and distinctively true, it is its own month—not much akin to either June or August.
Like the smell of peach cobbler baking in the oven, July’s heat brings out the honey-sweet scent of the season. The fragrance of clover and milkweed, sweetbriar, elderberry, and wild bergamot.
If you have a discerning palate, you might even be able to taste overtones of this heady mix—July’s distinctive flowery-sweet essence—in next winter’s jar of comb honey.
I’m not a big fan of latter summer’s oppressively extreme heat.
Once, when I stopped along a South Carolina backroad to buy a bag of boiled peanuts, the old gentleman manning the stand mopped his brow with a red bandana and pointed to a nearby hammock suspended between two sprawling live oaks.
“July is best endured from a supine position,” he said, grinning.
If I hadn’t been trying to make the rising tide on a certain redfish flat, I might have tried to work out an afternoon rental on that comfy berth.
But I certainly understood the notion.
When the Dog Days come around, I become as lazy as a bluetick hound lolling on the cool dirt under a shading porch.
While I do possibly envy that hound-dog response, our riverbank cottage lacks a porch, and the deck is barely high enough off the ground for a ground squirrel to dart under.
Instead, on July’s scorching afternoons, I settle for a chaise longue placed in the deepest, dimmest, coolest patch of sycamore shade I can find.
However, I’m not a daylong loafer. Before the afternoon heat builds, as early in the morning as I can manage—I regularly head out and about for a ramble.
The woods are refreshingly cool and damp. And the prairies and open fields aren’t yet stifling. If I make it out really early, either before the sun comes up, or within an hour or so thereafter, there’ll still be a bit of birdsong to enjoy, add their musical backdrop to my walks.
On a recent morning, a trailside clump of trumpet vine entwining a dead sassafras caught my eye.
Trumpet vine—some folks call it “trumpet creeper”—is considered a common plant hereabouts. But not all that common along the pathways I regularly follow.
Wherever, and wherever you find it, trumpet vine is spectacular, with shiny, dark-green leaves and a mass of large red and sherbet-orange flowers. Blooms are shaped exactly like their namesake musical instrument.
Trumpet vine is not only one of my favorite summer flowers, it’s also a favorite of hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees. As I admired the climbing, trailing, tangles, a couple of ruby throats, countless humming bees, and a mix of fluttering butterflies were all busy sipping the heady nectar from the plant’s showy blooms.
Late-July indeed has its moments.
Still, every year, after starting off with an initial fusillade of celebratory parades and fireworks, the rest of July always tends to pass along in relative subtlety. At least for me.
Long, lazy days of building heat, sultry nights, and for 2024’s version of this seventh month, lots of rain.
Excessive rain, some might understandably grumble.
For the incorrigible stream fisherman, July is one of the summer’s prime months for wading favorite smallmouth creeks.
Maybe not the year’s best, action-wise—though often better than expected. A surprising number of fish can be sweet-talked into sampling my lures if you go slow and work the cover and holding water thoroughly.
For me, this July has been a decided challenge when it comes to logging sufficient hours of fish-stalking time a’stream. Frequent rains have often kept my usual go-to creeks and rivers high and muddy. Even the handful of modest brooks, typically serving as my fallback waters for those days when larger streams are unfishable, often ran over their banks with water the color of creamed coffee.
Has the falling rain been excessive or merely generous? I dunno. But I miss my fishing time—and I’ll admit I’m starting to feel increasingly victimized by this weather-imposed piscatorial insufficiency.
Where better to be on a blazing July afternoon than belly-deep in a lovely Buckeye bronzeback creek?
It’s a worthy Dog Days conundrum. One I must ponder during tomorrow’s morning walk or before today’s afternoon snooze.
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