Requiem for August

 

The California Central Valley is not kind to August and its droves of returning scholars eager for fall to begin. Summer vacation may be over, but summer is not.

It is generally assumed that the beginning of the school year ushers in a new season—that the summer heat will gradually taper off and give way to more moderate temperatures. The assumption exists in our own valley, too, as a glance into any department store will show. Here, no one will think it strange that pumpkins and colored leaves decorate the shelves or that racks of sweaters are already being wheeled out, while the thermometer outside reads 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They will shrug and say, “School is starting,” and Google when Starbucks is going to start selling pumpkin spice lattes. It’s a national tradition, and it helps students romanticize the otherwise dreaded return to school.

Here in the valley, the extreme heat advisories will persist well into September. The real transition into fall—the cool temperatures, the changing colors, the phantom scents of rain—won’t take place until October. August and September will only be a continuation of the beating sun and parched earth of June and July, but with none of the excitement and freedom of summer vacation.

September is already a drab month; it is when school and all its unpleasantness begins in good earnest, but without any of the magic of the later autumn months. August, I think, has the hardest luck. It is fraught with the anticipation of a new season but has the unfortunate distinction of being the month when people begin wishing it was a different month. August is a waystation between vacation and school; it is the month in which we begin to mark important dates on our calendar and to take notice again, reluctantly, of the flow of time. It is not considered a summer month, although the weather is the same, nor is it quite a school month. It is certainly not an autumn month, however much we wish it. It is displaced and orphaned.

But to the Valley, to the white-hot sky above and stubborn ground beneath, August is no different than the months before it. The Valley does not observe our dates, nor keep time by our clocks. It will persist in its observation of summer, its holiest of seasons, and its only signal of the changing times, for the next month or two at least, may be a dwindling of the harvest.