Dog Days

I walk out past the barn, past the sheds, and through the gap in the fence that is old, twisted barbed wire to my left, and old wood plank to my right. Grasshoppers leap up and out of the path of my feet, an unending cascade of dust-brown bodies parting like waves before me. Out of the cascade every so often, one takes flight, bursting from a tight bullet body to a frenzy of black, yellow-tipped wings.

Where I walk, the grass has been beaten down by a full summer of footsteps. It is bent and bowed and yellow-dry. It smells dusty-sweet, like the scent in the hay barn of my grandparents’ farm where I played growing up.

But there are deeper tones to the scent of this grass. There is a scent, almost a sense of a scent, of well-baked earth beneath the sweetness. It smells of the energy of a hundred days of sun soaked deep into everything around me. Even where the grass is thick and green, the green is a darker, deeper shade than spring green grass. This grass is full and heavy, each blade seeming to bend under more than its own mass.

Even the leaves on the trees, mostly still green, some beginning to yellow, seem to hang more heavily on the branches than they did a week ago, even more than they did a month ago, and much more so than in the last days of spring. There is a sense of the world preparing to exhale. There is a meditative quality to the land and the air.

Dog-day cicadas drone a rhythmic wwoOWWwwwoOWWwww. The drone is deep and low with individual pitches soaring upward, chittering, then falling back into the hum. As I pass under old cottonwoods, their bark smells dry and hot, and the cicada song seems to come from everywhere, woven into the air itself. It presses against my ears as if it has physical weight, as if the sound and air woven together become something tangible.

I approach my destination, a wooden dock my brother built ten years ago. The wood is weathered, but not yet gray. It is a soft, warm butter-brown. The planks of the deck that wraps around it thunk hollowly under my boots as I cross them to the pier.

Two steps down from the deck, older and less sheltered by trees, the planks of the pier are weathered and bowed. The edges catch the treads of my boots and the hollow report of my footsteps takes a brighter edge as it echoes off the still water beneath it.

I sink down onto the planks at the very end of the pier. The warped wood under my hands is warm and has a softness, a fuzz worn into it by years of snow and storms and wind and sun. It is like feeling forty seasons beneath me, layer upon layer, sunken deep into the wood.

I put my shoes and socks aside and let my bare feet sink into the water. The cool lake and the warm sun meet in a line along the arch of my foot, as if the water has its own skin that is puckering against mine.

Across the lake, trees dot the far bank, some of them growing practically out of the water itself. Behind them, the foothills rise, ochre and dotted with dark and distant trees. The crests of the hills are hazy and indistinct where they give way to the lower peaks of the Rockies, which themselves are veiled in purple-blue which lightens into the lavender-grey of Mt. Meeker and Longs Peak. All the details of their faces are lost in haziness that blends upward into the undersides of clouds that burst upward from their shaded bellies into sharp strata, piled high and deep into the sky. A sky which, itself, seems faded by days of sun, bleached of its brilliant jewel blue of a month ago.

I gaze back across the face of the lake. On the water, trees grow backward, into the foothills, into the mountains, into the peaks, into the sky, painted along the face of the lake, a shiver of ripples giving it an impressionist blur. As I bring my gaze toward my feet, the mirror becomes translucent. Thick water weeds stretch upward out of the depths of the lake, melting into sight their perfect columns of feathery leaves.

Between the reaching green fingers, blue-gill drift. Blue-white tails and fins ripple in the sunlight, bright spots of color amongst grey-green bodies, barely defined against the darkness beneath them.

Watching the still fish clustered in the branches of the underwater forest, I hear the cicadas to my right go silent, and then the ones on my left. The only sounds are the throaty, echoing gurgle of water moving through the overflow pipe at the south end of the lake, and the low, distant rumble of traffic out on the highway to the north. The sudden emptiness sighs as if, the pressure of the cicada song relieved, the world itself is settling down into the vacant space.

A breeze cools the sun’s heat from the right side of my face. It’s chill is almost a portent of fall, like the world sighing out all the work of spring and summer and slowing and settling into autumn.

Back in socks and shoes, I rise and sigh, myself. Turning from the mountains and the water, I taste the air as I breathe it over my tongue. It tastes like harvest, dry and heavy and a little bit sweet. It tastes like the dust of dry cornfields I grew up riding my horse through in the late summers. It’s nostalgic, a warm embrace, a promise of safety and sustenance in the winter to come. I taste it once more, comforted, and make my way back home.

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