Lughnasa Honey Moon
The end of August is less than a week away. Labor Day is the next holiday. Once again a year has progressed from spring to growing season to the beginning of harvest. Do you remember that feeling you had, as a kid, when summer vacation was in its last moments? You got in one more baseball game, one more forbidden trip to the pit, one more search through the alleys for pop bottles to sell at the grocery store. You may have gone to a county fair or the state fair, had cotton candy and looked at the pigs, seen the new car models.
Then the supply list for the new school year would show up. Those lists were, for me anyhow, like the reading of marriage bans, the announcement that something wonderful was about to happen. Yes, I loved school and I loved the paste and the number 2 lead pencils and the watercolors and the rounded scissors. Shopping for school supplies was a joyful time. I know it wasn’t for everybody, but all I could see ahead was another year of learning, of time away from home, of lunches and recesses with friends.
In fact, I still love it and the little frisson of something amazing just around the corner still tickles me as the weather begins to cool (I know, we’ll skip this year right now) and Back to School flyers start showing up with the newspaper. (I know, lots of folks don’t read the newspaper anymore.) I’m feeling it now and this year it seems to run in tandem with the harvest, as it used to in the days of agriculture’s direct influence on our school year.
As the harvest has peaked, the fallow time has begun to insert its presence, a golden leaf here or there, plants dying back like the sugar snap peas and garden beds emptied of their onions, garlic, beets and carrots now mulched. These are clues, just like the changing of the sun’s position in the sky, that stir up that old hunger, the part of me that thirsts for new learning, new ideas, new facts, new ways of looking at the world.
I’m ready. Let the bells begin to ring.
