By James McGuire

Contributing columnist

As impossible as it may seem, August has spent its allotted time and is about to end. September will soon move in and take its place.

These are culminate days—summer’s final fling. That time of the year when the season begins winding up its business, getting ready to draw down the curtain and end another annual run.

Over two months ago, the passing solstice bid summer welcome. Now, less than a month from today, the autumnal equinox will summarily usher it out.

Too, back in June, when summer began, the new season’s days seemed to stretch endlessly ahead, far beyond our perceptive horizon; their end was unimaginable.

But the clock is always ticking. There’s no stasis in time or nature—never a genuine period of pause or rest, never a moment devoid of ongoing change at some level. Any notion of true permanence is a mere illusion, like a snapshot of a flowing river or a speeding train. Not really depicting time as it is now…only time as it was back then.

What seems inactive or everlasting is only a matter of perspective—never a view of situational reality.

I blame my lovely, delightful daughter for these pragmatic musings. Her birthday comes on the final day of August. When I recently stopped to buy her a card and read their various verses and sentiments, I couldn’t help but consider the passage of time.

That’s what birthdays celebrate: ongoing time. Yet it seems like only yesterday I was carrying her atop my shoulders as we ambled along a woodland trail, teaching her to ride a bike, and chauffeuring her to and from school.

In what now seems a few eye blinks later, she entered college, subsequently earned a post-grad degree, started a career, got married…and practically overnight, I acquired a son-in-law and two darling grandkids!

When I think about all this, I’m both astonished and nonplussed. How does speeding time change so much so swiftly!

Yet, alas—that is exactly the fact. Time moves inexorably forward…no matter how dearly we wish to hold it close. Daughters have birthdays, as do their fathers. Seasons flow one into another.

Two months back we witnessed another season begin. The last of spring’s wildflowers were fading. Birds had switched from building nests, laying eggs, and singing the praises of procreation, to the busy parental chore of feeding young. Seedling tomato plants were being placed gently and with much faith into the warming soil of the recently turned garden.

Summer’s hope and promise stretched endlessly ahead. Time was ours to spend and enjoy.

But now, that perception can no longer be sustained. While time in its enduring sense remains incalculable, inexhaustible, and everlasting, seasons indeed have boundaries—recognizable dimensions of beginning, middle, and end.

Mankind is incapable of creating or modifying time. But we’ve done a bang-up job of trying to quantify the seasons—measuring them as if they were sheets of plywood. Calendars and almanacs employ math and astronomy to calculate a season’s fundamental limits—to plumb its boundaries as if quantifying the depth and capacity of a river’s pool. We’ve set seasonal schedules and formulated dates and tables accurate to the millisecond.

Such information can be both interesting and useful. A quick glance at the Old Farmer’s Almanac shows me that since spring’s solstice-day beginning, we’ve already lost nearly two hours’ worth of daylight to earth’s steady tilt. And by the time autumn officially arrives, we’ll be down another forty-odd minutes.

But I knew that already—not with the precision of an exact figure, but simply by daily observation—watching dawns arrive later and sunsets creep in earlier. You’ve surely noted the same—and doubtless reached the same conclusion: summer wanes.

This is the practical truth of the matter. The weeks immediately ahead lead up to autumn’s equinox and the season’s changeover; they mark summer’s last hurrah.

Yet if you know anything about seasons, you realize they are never quite precise or on schedule. Though calendars and almanacs seek to contain time, their careful calculations are merely an illusion.

Seasons are as individual as people—no two are ever the same. One summer is blazing hot and dry, another wet, a third cool. While the exact moments of sunrise and sunset may be precisely figured, plants and wildlife adapt to the vagaries of individual years.

My backyard squirrels are absorbed in cutting walnuts and carrying off acorns. The chipmunks are busy at the seed feeders.

I heard late-summer’s initial katydid a week ago. Country folklore says we’ll have our first frost six weeks after katydids begin singing.

Bluejays are screaming at one another like they often do in October. Crows are noisier, too, reminiscent of autumnal behavior. Is this a portent of things to come?

In the field up the road, regal New England asters stand as islands of purple splendor amid a yellow goldenrod sea. Black-and-orange monarchs flutter in fragile, determined purpose—their journey ahead so unbelievably long and fraught with peril it almost breaks your heart to contemplate.

If only I could muster the monarch’s courage!

Beside a woodland trail, Jack-in-the-pulpit berries wink plump and scarlet.

A few mayflies are still hatching in one of my favorite pools below a large riffle, and every so often a smallmouth will pluck one off the surface with a splashy rise. In the gathering darkness, bats sift the air for bugs the fish have missed, but nighthawks are conspicuous in their absence.

No doubt about it…summer is clearly on the move. And yet, it is still August—at least for a few more days. Summer will linger awhile. There’s still time to savor the season.

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