Between July and September

OK, It’s hardly perfect, but of the selection of months currently in stock, August is one of the better models.

August weather, for example, is a paragon of reliability. Unlike such fickle months as April and November, August offers consistency. It’s hot. Sometimes hot and dry, more often hot and humid, but predictably hot. This provides an excuse for lethargy that at other times of the year would be taken for mere sloth.

A late entry in the annual lineup, August didn’t join the calendar club until 46 B.C. I figure it arrived several centuries after the other months because, like us during August, it just didn’t move very fast.

Along with July, August nestled in at the end of the summer. Before everything was settled, Augustus, with typical imperiousness, swiped a day from poor February and tacked it on the end of his namesake so as not to be out-done by the other Caesar’s month.

August is a gift of time. It’s too late to initiate more plans for the summer and too early to adopt autumnal hyperactivity. Every second person is on vacation and organizational wheels roll at a more leisurely pace.

By August, the garden is pretty much a given. Most everything that’s going to die has done so and, as long as you remember to water, the rest grows so rampantly that it would be hard to stop it, even if you tried. 

But why would you? August yields a feast for the body and fine food for the eye: vermilion tomatoes, emerald peppers, amethyst eggplants. What other month is so unabashedly voluptuous?

August’s most sterling quality, however, is the absence of holidays within its bounds. There is in August not a single officially ordained celebration of any magnitude. There are no obligatory rituals to endure, no traditions to defend. August requires no greeting cards, no tinsel or flags, no boxes of candy, plastic pumpkins or green beer. And not once in all of August are we forced by governmental decree to survive our Monday on a Tuesday.

August is as it is with good design. Without the relatively uncluttered weeks of early August, we could not face the frenzied rigors to come. As the days shorten, we redeem these unstructured hours, fuel to power us up and over the summit of Labor Day and on to all that lies ahead.