LIfe at Number 17

Starting what has designs to be primarily a garden blog in June...in coastal Georgia...probably displays a great amount of non-thinking...in the lower part of Georgia (not being able to speak to anything more than a few miles off the coastline), June and July and August...and even September are pretty much all about Hangin' On...hangin' on until that first cool breeze skips across your face...hangin' on until it is cooler when you get up in the morning than when you went to bed last night...hangin' on until just running a quick errand to the store isn't an exercise in Steeling One's Will...hangin' on until rain finally comes in countable amounts...

If you come down South in the summertime, you'll probably see lots of southerners with their faces tilted one of two ways...either up to the sky, scanning for rain clouds, hoping to catch that cool breeze or down towards the earth...beaten down by the heat and humidity, trying to escape the sun...Southerners get hot and harried and downright ugly (say like "ugg-leeee") when the heat comes on...because we know it ain't just passin' through...the people I admire the most have to be people who maintain their grace and manners long after the 4th of July comes on...because after the 4th, well, things can get grim...the 4th is supposed to be hot...so we suck it up & deal with it...but then there is all that leftover part of July with August hot on his heels...and then September...in the coastal South, September can be such a disappointment...

I remember going back to school (years and years and years ago) to find my teachers (dreaming of cool fall weather, Robert Frost's poems and scarlet-clad trees...and mannerly scholarly children) filling bulletin boards and door covers with cardboard cut-outs of leaves in the traditional colors of fall~brilliant gold. pumpkin orange. blazing red. nut-colored brown. One glance out the classroom window into the schoolyard would reveal mostly live oaks, still hanging onto their limp heat-beat green leaves, eternally green pines, and wilted azaleas~obviously my teachers and I bought into the same New England Fall Fantasy peddled by all sorts of enterprising businesses...

When leaves do finally hit the ground around these parts (usually somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas), mostly they are dirt brown...brown oak leaves...brown magnolia leaves...brown & sickly greenish yellowish pecan leaves...I think if you're a fallen brown leaf, it must be your responsibility to limb and root to be confoundedly difficult to rake...if you grow up with oaks, magnolias, and pecan trees in your yard, you'll probably be of the I Do Not Rake Leaves variety when you get a yard of your own... or you'll circumvent even havin' to hold that particular conversation with your Home Owner's Association by buying a yardless condominium

Anyway, I've never given up hope of having the Fall that I learned about all those years ago in elementary school...the mythical Fall of September lit by a sun hangin' in a clear light blue sky, clouds scudding along driven by a brisk cool breeze, leaves just beginning to turn, temperatures that just barely break 80 in the middle of the day and nights that beguile one with easy coolness...

And, if I live long enough, maybe I'll see the even more fantastical October of blazing color, 65 degree days, and Halloween Nights where children aren't passin' out from heat exhaustion on the front lawn...I just shake my head when I'm at the store and see full body polyester fur costumes that I know some poor unknowing mother will pick up on clearance after Halloween is just a dim memory and then stuff her child into next year...I always say a little prayer and hope for a cool night for the Trick-or-Treaters here in Coastal Georgia...

But, tryin' to close on a positive note, I guess one good thing about Autumn in the South is once it does finally get here, you have one thankful bunch of people...and we might even be a touch more humble...