In Defense of August
Why I’m adamantly waiting to embrace autumn
As the calendar turns to August, the mornings begin cooling off, and each year around this time I catch whispers of cravings for autumn. I begin to daydream of the crisp, chilly days, the grey skies, the leaves that turn, the quiet that settles over the land. The endless hum of summer has worn me down by this time of year, and I long for the slowness of autumn that wraps me cozily in knit sweaters and pumpkin spice lattes. There is a sentiment in autumn air that we all recognize and celebrate, and it’s easy to rush in and blur the end of summer. People have already begun celebrating “Augtober” and starting the Halloween movie marathons, while store shelves are stocked to the brim with Halloween decor. It seems that these days, everyone embraces “Spooky Season” by the time mid August rolls around. Yet when I look out my window at the sun shining brightly and feel the sticky heat creeping in by midday, the thrill of autumn rings hollow, like celebrating the drop of the New Years ball at 8pm instead of midnight. I find myself hitting the brakes. If the earth is not yet ready for Spooky Season, why should I be? Looking around at the natural offerings of the present season, I can see that there is a glowing, golden magic permeating the air in August that I don’t want to overlook in my excitement for autumn.
Even in the short summers of Minnesota, the long days and intense heat can make the season feel long; yet within the variations of summer, August has a magic all its own. The word “august” itself is an adjective that describes all things majestic and grand. That’s how the world seems to me during this season: radiant, shining, the grand finale before the abundance of summer comes to an end. This is the last hurrah of summer, and there is no shortage of grandeur in the natural world. Before we leap into pumpkins and apples and squash, there’s plenty for us to savor now: the harvests of tomatoes and peppers and summer squashes, the sweet corn and eggplant ballooning out of their stalks, the cucumbers ripening on their vines, the melons and stonefruits and berries dripping with the sweetness of the season. Sunflowers burst forth, coneflowers unfurl, black-eyed susans dapple front yards, zinnias dot the roadsides with vibrant colors, a blush creeps over the sedum while morning glories creep over fenceposts and doorways. August is peach juice dripping down chins; it is sticky sweet satisfaction. It is golds and yellows and browns, a hazy golden glow; it is light filtered through the colors of stained glass; not direct and scorching and bright, but strong yet soft. Soon enough, the earth will be blanketed in snow and the tomatoes at the store will be pink and sad-looking again, but for now, August is loaded with one last glorious cornucopia of ripe and shining light.
When it comes to the planets and stars, August spends most of its time in Leo season, a time associated with the confidence and strength of a lion, only to dip its toes into the organizational steadiness of Virgo toward the end of the month. This means August holds two characteristic energies: the first, a fiery, bold, golden strength that is all about self-expression (quite easy to see in the fruits of the earth at this time); the second, a more practical, meticulous reliability that brings us back to earth. With Leo ruled by the Sun and Virgo ruled by Mercury, we go from intense, bright, and radiant energy to organization and thoughtfulness. It is this transition from the peak of summer to the wind-down of the season that characterizes the month of August.
Of course, it’s not all glowy halos and radiant, dripping abundance. There are aspects of August that aren’t magical, you might say, and I would agree with you. It’s hot, and sticky, and exhausting. I’m tired of running my window unit air conditioner with its endless drone. I’m tired of the hustle and bustle and having to cram everything in. I’m tired of trying to figure out what to do with my garden, and I’m tired of my summer clothes. The fire-sign-ness of Leo season begins to feel overwhelming. On top of natural wind-down exhaustion, there’s a forced cultural pressure to launch into autumn once August hits: certain coffee chains launch their pumpkin spice menu, big-name retailers are loading the shelves with all manner of Halloween and fall decor, and it gets harder to go against the grain. I’ve seen some posts on Instagram calling out the recent rush into Spooky Season, arguing that with no unilaterally celebrated holidays in August (and therefore nothing to capitalize off of), corporations have learned to capitalize on the symbols and sentiments of autumn and Halloween earlier and earlier each year, pushing our spending habits into the next season long before we’re ready. This creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, inflating our excitement about a season and manufacturing an acceleration of the season. This lack of alignment between nature’s calendar and corporations’ false calendar feels more exhausting to me than the stretch of summer itself. Plus, I can’t help but feel spiritually ungrateful overlooking a period in the natural cycle that is so unique and ephemeral in its magic. Like the earth is heaving its final deluge of offerings at my feet, and I’m yawning and tapping my foot while craning my neck to look at the minimalist influencer’s house next door.
There are plenty of people who do celebrate a certain holiday in August: as the witchy online renaissance continues, more people (women?) are celebrating Lughnasadh (or Lammas, depending on what you prefer), a holiday that ushers in the subtle early shifts from summer to fall and promotes gratitude for the first harvests. It seems to me that some of these folks have an easier time being patient for autumn because they are living in sync with the earth’s calendar. I myself find it easier to be patient when I redefine “harvest season” to include the abundance of early August–quite a different picture than the October harvests of pumpkins and squashes, and certainly a different feel than preparing the earth for winter. This August harvest roots me in the nuances of the growing season and deepens my gratitude for the peak of produce running riot on the vines of my garden while the world around me starts its gradual dip into autumn.
Redefining language is perhaps the best way to stay rooted in the natural cycles of the seasons. I find the English language rather limiting in its ability to describe the seasons. By lumping the Earth’s cycles into only four categories–spring, summer, autumn/fall, and winter–we in turn only recognize four seasons, diminishing the nuances of the seasons and distilling them down into kindergarten-level vignettes. Yet there are groups of people whose languages better reflect the nuances of the earth, positioning them in a timeline outside of consumerism and Q3 sales pushes and the capitalization of celebration. New age pagans use “The Wheel of the Year;” the Ojibwe (who resided in the lands I live on long before European settlers did) have five seasons into which they divvy the year. Whatever approach you take, there is more to see in the natural world than is reflected in the language (and subsequent false calendar) of Marketing and Merchandise and Money, Money, Money that launches Halloween two to three months before its actual arrival. I prefer to use the calendar of what Wendell Berry calls “The Great Economy,” by which he means Mother Nature and the rhythms of Earth herself. Either way, when you use the language of nature to guide your sense of time, you stop seeing the seasons as a circle split into four starkly different patterns, and begin to see time as a much more transitory, nuanced repetition with far more to celebrate along the way. Instead of August being one more month of hot summer to get through, it becomes the golden sunset of summer, the transition season that is not quite summer, not quite autumn, and yet somehow a bit of both. The fire of Leo quiets to the groundedness of Virgo. The heat of July wavers toward the cooldown of September mornings and evenings. The herbs bolt and go to seed, the potato vines turn brown and beg to be dug up, the garden becomes a place where we begin to look ahead toward autumn preparations. The summer bucket list gets one last assessment, and we do our best to taste the last of the peaches and tomatoes before they ripen past their prime. The sunflowers stand tall, begging to be admired before the petals dry up and the birds strip away the seeds.
I am excited for autumn and all of the cozy, magical feelings it brings. I am thrilled for the apples of September and the pumpkins of October, for the thinning of the veil and all of the haunting and exciting rituals that come with that time of year. But the magic of autumn will come soon enough, and it would be a shame to skip over the exuberance of August and all of the magic that comes with the here and now.
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