Curtain Blowing Days

     It is August, the hot, panting, dog days of summer when the air sweats and the earth blisters beneath my feet. The trees complain with the electric buzzing of fat-bodied cicadas. I water the weeds in order to temper the cracked, iron-souled soil, and my burgeoning pots of geraniums and marigolds tire with the effort to flourish and threaten to wither. I become a slave to the sprinkler, a prisoner of air conditioning. Woe is me.

     Not this August. Last summer was relentless, but this year we have had armfuls brimming with curtain blowing days deserving of a whole blog post of wonderment. Some days I wake early in the morning feeling chilly beneath the sheet as the restless curtains fill with the sweet breath of summer whispering wistfulness to me. The windows and doors are flung welcoming-wide all day long and the lines between house and garden are blurred. The cicadas are hushed with disbelief. “Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability,” so I sit respectably beside an open window and devour books like ice cream. I go outside to water the flowers and shrubbery by hand because it lasts longer than sprinkling, and I have a need as urgent as thirst to quaff this rare elixir of days right down to its dregs. At night, I listen to the crickets brighten up the dark.

     What bliss there is in this crumpled old world.

     There are still the days that boil over and burn, after all, it is August; but I hold fast to those hours when I wake in the morning with the curtains blowing blessings to me.

oil on canvas by Karen Hollingsworth

quote by author and philosopher, Sam Keen