Mountain Country Summer has reached its full bodied maturity now that the end of August is at hand.
The intense heat and humidity is slowly giving way to cool nights and occasional balmy days.
Cloud pattern has changed from humid sheets of semi-dry muslin to high, puffy billows and pillows of marshmallow white with steel blue hemlines.
Breezes are a bit
stiffer and their periodic gusts have the aroma of change whose message is the hint of
pale yellows and light reds on the canopy of isolated deciduous trees.
Grasses are drying out from their tips downward about half way to their mid-riffs.
The wildflowers of summer have gone to seed bringing the golden yellow and black goldfinch its annual feast in companionship with other little tweety birds of lesser color but with equal enthusiasm for the fun and games of the season’s bounty.
Many other songbirds and wildlife have settled into preparing themselves for winter. The woodchuck is eating his heart out and his stomach full before disappearing into the earth for months to come. The clock is ticking time toward migration as birds are beginning to gather in small flocks.
While the antelope are playing on the western frontiers, the white-tailed deer are out and about in the open fields of Appalachian Mountain Country. This year’s fawn are more visible in singles and in pairs, a little less frisky and more content to browse with their mother does or lay quietly along ponds and streams. The proud father bucks are flaunting their velvet crowns willing to be a part of the family for now.
The regal mountain laurel and rhododendron blossoms are in seed and in bud for next year’s spring. A grand wildflower exhibition is overture to an early introduction to the rainbow confetti magic of Autumn’s flaming foliage.
Late summer’s passing parade leads off with white crowned pearly everlasting that brightens up the straw-browish grassy fields behind the purple tasseled thistle which marches courageously and assertively along fence rows and roadways. White, pink, and purple asters follow along in their own time. The glory of the summer’s colors is crowned by the brilliant yellow of goldenrod filling the fields and meadows to overflowing.
It is the gold of pot at the end of the rainbow whose multi-colors will journey around the world’s winter to return once more to spring and so it is to those tuned into the rhyme and reason in the rhythm and season of Appalachian Mountain Country Earth.
Copyright © 1988, 1999 Barbara A. Smith and John G. Hipps. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published August 24, 1988 in the Free-Press Courier, Westfield, Pennsylvania.