Down the Long Hill

August 18th and 19th

Down the Long Hill

"Sunrise comes later, now, and dusk creeps over the hills earlier in the evening. Reckoned from late June, when the Solstice marked the year's longest day, we have already lost an hour and a half of sunlight. Another month and the Autumn Equinox will be here and daylight will equal darkness, briefly. The year has turned, noticeably; and Summer is walking down the long hill toward Autumn and the Winter beyond.

On a scorching August day such a change seems to run counter to the season as we now know it. Now, we feel, as the hot humidity lies heavy upon us, is the Summer's peak. If the season is already moving downhill, why do the temperatures remain here on the summit? The reason is that it takes the Earth a time to warm up, and that it does not cool off in a moment. Any housewife knows that if she is going to cook a roast or bake a pie she must give her oven time to get hot; and that even though the oven is turned off before the cooking is done it will retain the heat long enough to crust the roast or scorch the pie. So with the Earth. It took from June to August for it to warm up, and it will take till late September for it to cool off again.

But the trees show the true season, and so do the grass in the meadow and the tall weeds at the roadside. Early apples begin to ripen. Daisies fade and goldenrod shows impatient yellow. New growth is slow; seed pods fatten; the soft growth of May hardens toward maturity. Dog days are virtually over. Another Summer seeps away as dusk settles in the valleys a few minutes earlier one day after another."

Hal Borland
"Sundial of the Seasons"
August 1947