Standing at August’s Threshold: End-of-Summer Reflections

Lingering on the edge of autumn with favorite literary quotes, nostalgic memories, and a fresh raspberry pavlova recipe.

My attempts to follow in my mom and grandmother’s pie-baking skills footsteps. Raspberry and strawberry pies. See the recipe for raspberry pavlova at the end of this post.

It’s August, already!

This month catches me off guard. Impossible that we are already past the year’s midpoint. I can feel the earth teetering on its axis, giving us a balancing act before tipping into fall’s shorter days and cooler nights. It stirs up a cornucopia of melancholy and anticipation, memory and hope. As though the fall is a doorway and August the threshold to change.

For months I’ve been head-down in writing, giving book talks and marketing my book Saving Vincent. August is reminding me to pause, breathe deeper.

Slow down.

To help me linger, I’ve turned to a few literary pros (and a lyricist) who understood the weight of thresholds, matching their words to my own remembrances.

On Ferris Wheels and Floating Moments

"The first week of August is motionless, hot. It is at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it stops in its turning." Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt (1975)

As a kid (OK, now too) my hands-down terrifyingly favorite carnival ride was the open-air Ferris wheel. Every August, traveling county fairs would cross Illinois, setting up rides in empty fields. Inevitably, I would abruptly lose my nerve and so would plead and bribe and negotiate hard with whoever sat with me—sister, BFF, brothers—not to rock the bucket. My throat was always gloriously hoarse by the end of the ride.

The Promise of Back-to-School Do-Overs

"The August rain, which for days has been falling on the roof, has made this an odd, uneven time. It is a time between summer and autumn." The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Path (2000)

Little smarty-pants me looked forward to back-to-school un-scuffed shoes, bright backpacks, notebooks with empty clean pages. I’ve always loved the do-over, fresh start promise of the fall. And so, August is a toss-up between clinging to the past, leaning toward the future. I pressed open the pages of a new journal this week and caught a little whiff of this “odd, uneven time.”

Sensory Memories from the Raspberry Patch

“In August, the large, heavy, ripening berries bend down the twigs, and the bushes are weighed down with fruit.” The Journals of Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau (published posthumously in 1906)

Raspberry jam, raspberry pie, raspberry cake, raspberry pavlova*. After I graduated from my Illinois college and moved to the Big City (St. Louis), my educator parents (dad taught at a university; mom at a grade school), moved to a 9-acre plot off of Cemetery Road. Once they’d built the house, they filled remaining acreage with rows of raspberries. Visits home on weekends meant I had to earn the homemade raspberry syrup on my pancakes by picking berries early. Dad made hands-free make-shift buckets to capture the ripe berries with sawed-off plastic ice-cream gallon jugs. He added a cord so it could hang around the picker’s neck. With both hands free—one to gingerly pull away the thorny branches, the other to pluck off the berries—my task was to fill the gallon jug. Out early before the sun’s heat beat too intensely, dew dampening my sneakers, the buzz of insects gradually rising: I carry a sensory memory that revisits my August mornings still.

Sweet Nostalgia of First Love

“Summer lovin’,/ Had me a blast / Summer lovin’ / happened so fast” Grease “Summer Nights” (1978)

Summer before my senior year in high school I met a guy who had a red convertible (be still, my heart), played bass in a rock band (oh my heart’s sped up!), and could kiss like he meant it. Yes, he broke up with me and I moved on to other loves (especially the forty-year adventure I’m currently on), but that dreamy threshold into first love stays sweet.

Standing at this threshold once again, I feel the familiar pull between what was and what’s to come. August may be slipping through our fingers, but there is comfort in the doorway: Newness is coming.

I hope you slow down a bit,