The date bothers me.
It’s early August.
Sitting on a log in an arena of sound, the falling of an occasional leaf the only movement, I try to still my mind, but it’s as active as the voices of ten thousand anthropods beneath this canopy of green and blue, each seeking to be heard.
Those articulations — the uttering, stuttering of creatures smaller than my thumb — define this season. They are part of why I have come here, seven and a half miles deep into Westwood Park, following a dirt trail often no wider than a skillet. I need a safe haven, hoping to quiet whatever makes noise inside me. But I’m failing.
It’s early August.
In the music of a different place, I find my senses equally attuned. Lyrics convey the shattering immediacy with which a mood can flip. In recent weeks, the song I keep returning to is Dido’s “It Comes and It Goes.”
It arrives when it feels and it takes what it needs / And it leaves before I get to know
No lock can prevent the intrusion. And at no time of year is that thief more likely to ransack my emotions than now. When July wanes. When August waxes. Feeling summer turning a corner, I steel myself and wait.
But calendars aren’t all it takes.
From my log, I’m aware of the bandit within me, picking pockets where I store the things I hold the dearest, until I’m numbed by what’s left. Magnificent oaks tower overhead, but disarray holds my attention. I see it in nature’s random placement of trees and plants, in the rolling landscape that tumbles into a ravine and clambers up the other side, in the juxtaposition between a sapling that might still take root here in a century and the drooping, sickly colored mayapples that won’t last until the first frost.
The mayapple will return. On time. In its season. That much I understand.
Today there are also chance encounters, like the owl that swooped from a tree and flew past me. We shared the same space momentarily, me on my bike, the bird in the air, so close I could feel the powerful strokes of its wings. Just as soon it was gone.
It comes and it goes.
I should be thinking about that owl. Here at the top of Westwood, I should breathe easily. The worst of the hills behind me. Only two and half miles back to the trail head. Sitting in my favorite spot. Once again in the woods.
But I know the month. And the emptiness of my pockets.
It’s early August.
The date bothers me.
Mountain bike: 10 miles — Westwood Park
