Thank [insert FAVORITE DEITY  here] it’s August, OK? Though by the time you see this, it will be late in the month and your chance to wish me a happy birthday will have gone by.   But—August: corn, blueberries, peaches, a little cooler at night, a little darker in the morning. Those flashes of heat and humidity a little less fierce, a little more promise of fall.

My theory is that July is the run-on sentence of the summer, the longer and more frantic of the two summer months. Most people roar into July with all the energy of FOMO and a desire to cram as much activity into a two week vacation as they can. Too many words, spoken too fast, all in a row.

August, though, is a comma, a pause, a place where the sentence of the summer slows down. The returning visitors who favor the month embrace a slower pace, lazier days, less rock and roll and firework-filled nights. More campfires, cribbage games, watching for fireflies. And in the second half of the month, the families with school age children are peeling away, more focused on what’s coming than what is present.

The comma of August also reminds those us who live here of what we have. The bounty of the garden and the farm stands, the welcome shock of Kettle Cove after a lawn-mowing session, a cup of coffee on the sun porch before the neighbors wake up. These are small things to treasure against what we know is coming. August is about taking a breath.

There’s little left to do in the garden, some weeding maybe, more harvesting, but it’s too early to start cleaning it up. The high energy of July slides away into a slower mellower pace and we have the sense the world is balanced on the edge of a long lazy pause before we plunge back into the world of work and schedule and obligation, our other life.

Because it’s my birth month, August has outsized importance for me. I’ve finished the draft of the next book in time for my birthday and I plan to luxuriate in laziness until the end of the month. So August is a comma for me too, an opportunity to pause for a bit at the bottom of the next hill to climb, drink a beer, have a fried haddock sandwich, and eat corn and peaches until I can’t. The upward climb starts again soon enough. I hope you have found your August and blessed yourself with it. We will need its memory soon enough.