That Late August Feeling with some views of the garden

Do you know it? The nights are cooler - even if the days are hot. There's something different in the sunsets - though they still linger till after 8 o'clock. And the music! The sounds! And don't get me started about the fragrance! Ripening scents are everywhere - in the trees, the grasses, the croplands ...

We seem to be having one of those damp cool Augusts. There hasn't been a triple digit day for weeks and we're promised 10 days of temperatures below 90 in today's weather dot com prediction. Right now it's overcast and about 80 and I am wishing I'd done my Saturday housework yesterday when it was not so dank. Now if I mop the floor it won't get dry unless I turn on the oven and bake something ... which I just might do.

I'm reminded of another August that was cool, but wet. LD was moving into his first apartment at the start of his junior year of college. I'd come down with one of those summer cold/wet weather mold allergy things and felt like death - but I was adamant that nobody could set up housekeeping without a cast iron skillet and the only place to buy one was at a serious shopping mall. (Walmart sells them now but this was then - when all they carried was the cheapest of aluminium products) So. Off we went to Fredericksburg to buy New Apartment stuff. I was so tired and dragged out by the time we got home all I wanted to do was to crawl in bed. I told the Darlings to fix their own dinner out of whatever crumbs were scattered in the kitchen. As I changed into pajamas I noticed a car driving up to the house. A foreign car - not anybody I recognized. Two women got out of the car and I thought "missionaries" because they're the only unexpected strangers who ever drive all the way down our lane. I was just about to shout out to someone to go shoo them off when I noticed one of the women pulled a gift out of the back seat and suddenly I remembered. Weeks ago - before the summer cold/allergy thing, before the long spell of dank weather, when I was at work, not in my Last Chance to Baby My Almost Grown Son mode, via that relatively new form of communication: e-mail - I'd invited some seriously distant kinfolk - a daughter and her mother, who were coming to Virginia to do genealogy research - to stop by for dinner.

Right. No food in the house. Me in pajamas. Everything in disarray for getting PreciocusAngelBabyDarlingOnlySon back to college. The house as dim and dank and unwelcoming as it could be. And out of town guests. Come for dinner!

I served them strange mystery meat in gravy over rice for dinner and fortunately, my BigDarling can always entertain genealogists - and they were his kinfolk, mind, so he knew all the lines. Nevertheless - it was an awkward evening. Both of them knew I'd forgotten. It was too obvious to miss. The mother thought it was hilarious and said it was just like something she would do. The daughter - an accountant for the IRS - did NOT think it was funny and has never spoken to me again.

Ah well. Some things can't be fixed. But as summer winds down with that late August feeling, we try to get in the last of whatever is left of the season and ... whatever can't be done does not get done.

Yes. Summer is winding down and it's doing so quickly.