August: a month that starts with humidity and ends with college football. In between, it's filled with everything and nothing, a month that languishes and races, a month that looms large in import and recedes in any semblance of daily structure until the very end, which is when you're practically smacked upside the head with daily structure.
If August were a specific time and day, it would be Sunday evening. Technically, it's still summer, but in your bones you know you're staring down the end of things. You know the other shoe will drop, that hazy days won't linger forever, that school busses and football games and parent-teacher conferences and increasingly early sunsets are near.
But now that I'm at the end of it, I'm not entirely certain where August went. Oh, I did stuff, alright. I finally cleaned my garage of remnants from a garage sale that took place in July. I touched up the dings on the exterior doors with fresh paint. I made a dozen zucchini bread one afternoon from one giant zucchini — mammoth, really – that resembled one of those fat, oversized plastic wiffle ball bats that, if you connect just right, it would carry the ball deep into your neighbor's yard, if not your neighbor's neighbor's yard.
I drove kids back and forth to various places, and back and forth again. I read books, and went to garage sales on Friday mornings, and watched reruns of Brooklyn 99, and cut the grass, and talked with neighbors, and gathered with friends, and moved our oldest daughter into her first college apartment, where I sat on the floor with a screwdriver assembling the legs back onto the old wooden kitchen table we bequeathed to her. I received — and largely ignored — no fewer than 172 emails from my younger two children's school. I took regular evening walks and listened to crickets get louder as the month plodded along.
Like a responsible adult, I also squeezed in a few doctor's appointments. As the semester encroached in earnest, I met with colleagues, visited my classrooms, attended all my department's orientation meetings, formatted my syllabi, and published my Canvas classes. The semester officially started yesterday, so I've tenuously memorized all my students' names through a repetitive, yet highly effective, ice breaker that I've been doing on the first day of semesters for eons. Hopefully I'll remember most of those names tomorrow.
August isn't as quite as tricky as it once was when our kids were little. They've now experienced many starts of many school years themselves. Even though it's a draining process regardless of age, their ages allow them to take it in stride. Everyone, it would seem, is growing up.
Even so, August, somehow, remains a month fit for childhood nostalgia, if you let yourself lean into such things. It feels like a month where you'd sit on a porch swing, sipping sweet tea and watching the lightning bugs blink their Morse code into the dark, and you'd soak it all in because soon enough, you know, summer will be over.
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