August

I sometimes have a dream about August.  My parents and I are visiting our old home in Sackville, New Brunswick.  I tell them that it's time to return to Toronto because it'll soon be September, but nothing happens.  It isn't that they want to stay, it's that they're too indecisive to go.  And I get angry about having to wait.

For me, August is a time of fresh peaches, blueberries and corn on the cob.  It's a time when summer's coming to an end just when you're taking it for granted, and a new school year is about to start. It has a certain bittersweetness.

In the first few years after I moved to Toronto, in the early 1990s, I'd visit Sackville in May and August.  I'd help plant our back yard garden in May, and peas and such would be ready to harvest in August.  My last such visit was in August, 1994. (Then the parents moved to Toronto too.) In that last summer we simplified the garden and just planted peas, and in August we harvested them all. It was the August of Augusts.