Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Summer’s exhaust has begun to hit our nights as warmer days recede slowly toward the equator.  The light has begun to change, especially in the evenings, but visible during the day as well, coming to us at a different angle. The change is noticeable now, a month and a half after the sun’s greatest height of the year on the Solstice. These subtle clues cue birds and other animals to begin edging toward migration or fur growing or nut gathering. They come to each living thing in a scale appropriate to the action needed, less subtle to the birds and the bees, more subtle to us large mammals.

I’m celebrating the ending of my last northern summer, one I’ll trade next year for a mountain summer, which must be as distinctive in its own way. When I moved north, now 45 years ago, I wanted cleaner breaks between seasons. And I got them. I’ve appreciated the heat and humidity of summer here. The cool blue of fall. The icy depths of winter and the explosive coming of spring. Moving west into the mountains, I’m hoping to modulate the heat and humidity of summer and lessen the brutality of the winter.

It might have been my August trips to Stratford, Ontario as a boy that made me yearn for the northern summer. Along Lake Huron then the skies were heart-breaking, a mix of faded heat and oncoming chill. I felt stimulated, alive both to the weather and to the cultural tradition of Shakespeare and the theater. It was then, too, in 1963 at the Black Swan Coffee House in Stratford that I first heard a radical critique of American policy in Vietnam. Perhaps those things forged a bond, the northern summer and activism, because they’ve been joined since my move to Wisconsin in 1969 only six years later.