August 2024

We don’t know what to do with all of this abundance. 

August comes through in a rush, like a child, almost forgotten and late for the schoolbus. The trailing, tail end of summer waving us down in a too-big backpack. Last year the girl brought in vase after vase of the goldenrod as it came up, but this year we’re watching it from the windows sprout and flower and seed and fall.

The only gold inside is the light at four in the afternoon, and the frame of the white board where the girl erased drafts of her book to write Happy 80th Glenda. 

Who has time to pick the flowers and strip the stems and fill the glass water when there is still a river warm enough to swim in, and petals coming up on the banks, and books we haven’t read yet, waiting on the shelves for their turn to be held?

The fridge is too full. The closet is too full. The mailbox, the bed, the baskets, the couch, the gutters, the drawers, the journals, the cameras, the pockets in the purses under the winter coats still hanging by the door, too full. My kitchen is so full of people it’s standing room only and the too full baby, fussing, is passed person to person like communion bread until she’s calm. 

It is the best complaint I’ve ever had, this abundance. My favorite problem. What a wonderful worry that the trees are tired of holding up their apples and their arms drag down close enough for us to reach. What a silly celebration that black walnuts are all giving up their game of hide-and-seek and coming down on the tin roof in loud fragrant crashes. 

The girl is out just now, pulling grapes from the boxwood bushes, and spitting seeds in a jar to send some of this harvest forward in time. I am doing the careful work of holding still for the 4 o’clock light, catching it in fading bursts, like the long last notes of a new song before the silence, before the applause. 

It just keeps going,

the apple house