august is the cruellest month

August is a tricky month.  I try not to have favourite months, any more than parents should have favourite children.  Christopher Lloyd's favourite plant was this one, that he was looking at now, at this moment, and so it should be with months.  Enjoy each in turn for its own particular qualities, and do not wish your life away wanting the present month to be gone, so that it can be some other month.  That's the theory.  But August is difficult to love.

I once worked with somebody who seemed to live between holidays for the next holiday.  Given that she spent far longer at work than she did away, this seemed a waste.  Mind you, the last time I saw her it was over a decade since she stopped working, and she had since qualified as a therapist, but wasn't seeing any clients.  When I asked why not, having done the training, she said she did not wish to commit to them, since once you had people under your care you couldn't just swan off and leave them, and if she had clients she would not be at liberty to go, should someone invite her somewhere exciting.  Nobody had invited her to stay with them in the Carribean or the south of France, however, and in the meantime she was not using her training.  Probably she didn't really want to.  She did let slip that she'd done it partly to understand herself.  Still, she could have done with the extra income.

So, it doesn't do to allow the potential delights of the future to interrupt the actual pleasures of the here and now.  But it is difficult not to feel that August is a fallow month, in which one merely marks time until productive life begins again in September.  It is so sticky, and dusty.  Breathing the humid air feels such an effort, it is impossible not to long sometimes for the cool, clean smell of the first days of autumn.  I shouldn't, of course.  I should be thrilled that I can sit out on the veranda in the evenings for a few more weeks, when I'll be huddled by the fire for so many months. The countryside looks dark and heavy, the garden sere and yellow after July's heatwave.  The flowers are not yet finished, the hydrangeas are just opening, and the asters still to come, where they have not shrivelled in the drought.  I ought to be delighting in each panicle of Hydrangea aspera, an elegant shrub as fine as any that spring has to offer, as fervently as I enjoyed the daffodils and primroses.  And I do like it, only part of me is itching for it to be time to chop down all the tatty foliage and tidy it away, and for the tired, dull leaves to fall from the trees.  I hanker for the crisp, pristine starkness of winter, the borders neatly trimmed and mulched, and the clean air slipping easily into my lungs.  I remember what it was like not to feel sticky, in fact not to sweat at all, and not to feel lethargic, but instead have muscles primed to go, snug in their layers of fleece.

It is very ungrateful of me.  I'll have to remember how I felt in November, when I'm stuck inside for days on end by rain, and in February, when it snows, and for all the six months between the two equinoxes when the nights are more than twelve hours long.  When we give up trying to heat the sitting room for another winter and decamp to the study, I'll remind myself how nice it was on those hot August evenings, when the sitting room doors were always open, and I lay on a steamer chair outside while the Systems Administrator barbecued steaks.  It was very nice.  It was now.  Now is very nice.

It would be even nicer, if it were less humid.  And less dusty.