Fragments From Floyd

It is before 5 o'clock on a late July morning. All the windows were open overnight but it is already pasty muggy sticky hot in the house. Situated in this deep valley surrounded by a thousand-acre woods, it rarely is too warm in the early morning, and I am thankful for this. I lack my usual early-rising verve. I just want to sit very still so as to generate as little extra heat as possible. I stare at the empty screen and sit. Sit, and wait for signs of fall.

Today, Accuweather forecasts a high of 99 here. I've never seen temperatures that high since we moved here seven years ago. Record high for this date in Roanoke, always at least five degrees warmer than Goose Creek, was 98 set back in 1987. Today's heat may be a record breaker. And then, those signs of fall will come, when a cold front passes through tomorrow night. Next week, while I am at the mercy of summer in Kentucky, actually promises to be very pleasant by recent standards, cooling into the low fifties at night. The clouds may even show the change, as they do in early August.

And as I steeped and stewed in my dread of the day of heat ahead, I remembered: there are some good things coming in early August: signs of fall. The following (since I lack the energy to write this morning) is a minor rewrite from my first blogging summer in 2002:

It is August at last. True, there may not be a great deal of difference in day or night-time temperatures, yet. But here in southwest Virginia, we can typically expect a tantalizing preview of fall during the first half of the month, and there are 'signs of fall' already, if you know what to look for.

Autumn's plants are up, although they're not very conspicuous yet. You won't notice them as you drive along the highway for another three weeks or so. But it is part of the pattern of things that the goldenrod, Queen of the Meadow (Joe Pye Weed) and Ironweed are soon to bloom, adding rich deep yellow, dusky mauve and royal purple to the pallet of color in every meadow and pasture border.

The starlings will begin to grow restless, bunch up, then break apart into little groups again, like they cannot quite get comfortable with each other in a crowd. The instinct to migrate must be a powerful itch. It won't be long before an occasional Monarch butterfly shows up, passing by in loops and glides. Winged wisps of will, they lift on the rising heat, at first in no particular direction and free of hurry; then, later, and unfailingly westward, they move purposefully toward winter roosts in central Mexico, in such numbers that they break branches out of trees.

Wooly worms will show up here in the next week or two. Again, not in large numbers, discovered here and there under a piece of firewood or scattered slab of barn board. Later, they cross the roads of Floyd County in large numbers in their brown and black three piece suits, seeking shelter for the coming winter.

In August, the locusts and walnuts, last to get their spring leaves, are first to shed them. Harbingers of fall, the feather-pinnate leaves of Sumac will be among the first to redden along the wooded roadsides, followed soon by Virginia Creeper, both well ahead of the color change that will come later in poplars, hickories and maples.

Some of the 'fallness' that I know I will feel this week, or next, has nothing to do with changes in the visible sense. It will be a sensation that come from of the imperceptible loss of time as the days shorten minutes each day-a resetting of our internal clocks that wake us up at certain points in the season, just as our inner alarms awaken us promptly every morning. I am confident that if you blindfolded me, and spun me around ten times, and placed me anywhere on the calendar, I could tell you "this is early August", by the feel of it alone.

On such a day as this in early autumn, I will breathe in the new smells that August alone can give-the scent of old hay, of corn stalks going but not quite gone by-a potpourri of plant matter in profusion, baked dry and fragrant by the July sun: monarda and pennyroyal, spicebush and sassafras. These aromas were present but not appreciated in late July. Today I will be looking for them. I'll celebrate their presence, and stop more frequently for deep drafts of it during the day.

This week, or the next, I will exclaim "that is a Fall sky!" The round piled and billowed clouds of summer for a day or two will give way to clouds streaked and smeared, thin, high and attenuated with the ends turned up, against a turquoise sky.

Fall will make a few short sorties in August, then retreat, and return again to stay longer each visit. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. It is time for fall, even though the season has not yet quite arrived.