OH, TO SEEP OUT OF bed on a summer morning, trailing dream rag-ends after you, to find a bright full-size dream still in play. In many ways this is the finest time of the year: The roses bellow scent and cascade over obelisks and each other. Squirrel babies are feeding and mischiefing all over the yard and roof, skittering across the skylights, robbing the bird feeders. At any moment, a quick flick of a newt will flit up a garden fence and start doing push-ups to attract a mate. Groundhogs come right onto the back patio, hummingbirds are braver around humans, and skunks and raccoons peer through the screen doors. Tiny haunting eyes shine red at night. Tall trees have leafed out into a vast wall of privacy. Yellow sundrops ignite all the flower beds. Orange daylilies trumpet from the roadsides. And the voice-dueling birds keep winding their springs, buzzing their kazoos, whistling, warbling, and chattering in a divine ruckus of warring songs.
Summer lives in the shadows of old trees striping the road, the hurry-up-and-wait jumping of squirrels, and the pungent magenta ruffles of roses rocking gently like pomanders, their perfume so bakery-sweet I can’t resist smelling them over and over until my sated nose gives up, exhausted. The only news this morning is that a yellow-throated lily has appeared near the bay window, and the ligularia has raised a dozen flat radar-dish leaves even higher and tauter in the dappled shade.
The rising sun bleaches everything it touches—now the lawn, the gray fence, the cream slats of a neighbor’s house, the bald hedges two barely antlered young bucks stripped down to the bark yesterday. How you’ve grown, I found myself saying silently, remembering them with buttons on their foreheads only a month or so ago. Do they have growing pains, as humans do in adolescence? It occurs to me that I don’t know the sound of a deer in pain.
Parent catbirds, goldfinches, robins, jays, wrens, blackbirds, and sparrows are all running a proper shuttle service, providing hundreds of mouthfuls for their chicks. When their paths cross at the nest, they usually do a fluff-and-quiver dance on nearby branches to plight their troth. If they arrive with a small green tidbit, the babies squawk in unison.
In the apple tree, a female catbird stays inside its nest with the chicks while the male delivers food. I don’t know if she eats what he gives her to keep her strength up while tending the brood, or if she’s there to macerate the food first and then feed it to the young. It’s always easier if a parent pre-digests food a little for its offspring. We do the same thing by cutting up and cooking food, I suppose, and it amuses me that mouth-feeding is the most likely origin of French kissing. In the not-so-distant past (and in the present among some “traditional” people, as doctors discovered in a couple of unusual cases of HIV transmission), human mothers pre-chewed food for their infants, just as birds and other animals do, and passed the food by mouth and tongue into their baby’s mouth. When the infants grew up, they retained loving associations with deep kissing, and that trick worked so well in pair-bonding that the kissing remains, even when the pre-digesting doesn’t. In chic restaurants today, one can order “macerated” greens, and whenever I see the word I’m reminded of bird mash, French kissing, and how we’ve never gotten over our yen for mom’s semi-digested food.
A humid, overcast sky; the air feels like cloud. On soggy mornings dragonflies and birds fly low over the earth hunting insects close to the ground. The air sags heavy with water droplets, suspended, refusing to rain. I may see and describe it as still, yet each second contains a legion of events. Even the so-called still air is twitching and aglow, churned by currents imperceptible to me but carrying spores and birds, insects and leaves, fungi and pollen, viruses and gases. And it is never still for long, but always everywhere fidgetingly alive. A stillness of winds strong enough to bend trees and move oceans of sand, erode hillsides, sculpt shorelines, sow seeds far and wide. The still world is too quick to behold, the silent world clamors with noise.
I wish I could hear the ultrasonic squeaks of mice, who seem to have almost as many calls as we do, from a pup’s squealing I’m lost! Where are you, Mom?! to a male’s ultrasonic grunting thrusts during sex. I try to picture all the crickets listening through eardrum-like membranes on their knees, all the cicadas listening likewise through their bellies. Because I can’t hear the mice, it helps if I picture them, even though I can’t really see them. And even if I did see them, I wouldn’t just be seeing them but also remembering them. Brain-mapping shows that two-thirds of vision is memory, not what’s happening in the occipital lobes! When I see a magnolia branch, my brain provides an image of the full tree, when I hear a rat-a-tat-tat, my brain riffles through its images for a woodpecker viewed one morning last fall. Memories are always true to the moment of recall. Each time we haul them up from the brain’s sloshy attic, we primp and prune them in terms of the here and now, and store them as slightly different mementos. As we grow and change, each memory adapts so that we feel real and fuel a continuous sense of self. And so every generation experiences a unique version of history, and everyone revises memories over time.
July will be a scorcher for those of us on life’s Serengeti, by which I mean all of us. But it’s also a time pitted with reminders of how many days have fled. Now I’m stung by the same elements that surprise and delight me: the bees’ golden pantaloons as they collect nectar with increased urgency, the beautiful hedges of ornamental grasses that began the summer flush with the ground and now offer a gauntlet of five-foot-high spears, the longer time the hummers spend at the feeder, fattening up as fast as possible for migration—only two months away. Of course, summer does not exist in the mossy-brown bark of the magnolia, chocolate in the blur of rain. Not even in the indigo’s fat seedpods, each one a plump lady’s leg with a seamed stocking. Summer exists only in the mind of the beholder. Peering through the spectacles of tree limbs and watching the nectar-gathering of bees, we bring summer to this so-called July, whose days wear numbers only if counted.