A Cool August Evening

Nine-thirty p.m. on the front porch in the Coast Range, my outpost for cogitation on all things. The thermometer registers 60 degrees, and a pool of cool August darkness is spreading across my skin. Despite the stately march of deep summer, nightfall carries the leading edge of September into my nostrils. Moon has waned to three-quarters and waits to rise from behind the eastern ridge. For now, there is only the star-punctured night.

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I long for the twitter of a western screech owl. The rush of air across the wings of a diving common nighthawk. But I’m visited only by the sounds of my own contrivance. A box fan hums in the doorway behind me, blowing fresh night air into the stuffy house. The low-pitched rattle of an oscillating sprinkler on my left squirts springwater onto the garden baked thirsty by a week of summer sun. I shut off the motion sensor on the porch light and opt for my headlamp, a more focused version of technology that allows me to scritch words into my journal long after I should have gone to bed.

Alone in the darkness, my chest swings wide open. Sadness drifts in, relentless as the tide, a downward oscillation. My friends are a blessing, and recently several have honored me by sharing their looming health issues. My swollen knee reminds me that our bodies are temporary vessels that will carry us only for a finite time in this infinite universe. I remember the sadness when Dad finally embraced his mortality by declining a major surgery that might have extended his life. But we celebrated his courage in choosing an end over a nebulous and drawn-out withering away.

Four years later, Mom clings to dignity with everything she has. She is relinquishing the house she shared with Dad for nearly six decades to my son and his family. Her great-grandsons will experience the same freedom of pasture and forest I had while growing up. Yet the move is fraught with sifting through six decades of accumulation. She and Dad grew up in rural depression-era poverty, a time of DYI self-sufficiency. Material possessions were never taken for granted, and everything might “come in handy someday.” Our disposable society could use some of that attitude. Instead, we have trash mountains and garbage barges bound for impoverished continents beyond our eyesight. But going through life with a clenched fist can also become debilitating. Mom clutches for a previous existence that spins inexorably away, leaving in her hands only a vacuum of longing in this time when here and now has become short. I ache for her.

Tonight I’m sad for my friends and Mom and everything human and more-than-human in this breaking and broken world. Yet life continues to choose life. Our cells have been doing this for 3.7 billion years. How can we fail to honor a call to living that has been 3.7 billion years in the making? Tonight I celebrate life, including my sadness.

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Meanwhile, Moon will soon rise. She’ll visit me like a pale dream floating through the open bedroom window, leave me tossing for sleep in the owl hours of morning. Then there will be sunshine and coffee and oatmeal with blackberries. The zucchini and blueberries are ready to be picked. That new wall on the house still needs battens. And for this moment, life has gifted me a small slice of tranquility on a cool August night to sit all sad and exultant and expecting. The stars are jubilant in their longevity.