'An August Might Be Mysterious'

“Summer attains its greatest dignity & power in August.”

I’m not sure I buy that, at least the dignity part. In Houston, August is the least congenial month. It fights you. You walk ten paces to your car and you’re sweating. Our lowest high this month has been 91°F.; the highest, 99°F. Left unspoken but on everyone’s mind is the looming threat of a hurricane. Three years ago on Aug. 26, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. My car flooded and we were without power for four days. A former colleague of my wife’s, her husband, teenage daughter and four cats moved into our second floor and lived with us for three and a half months. Their house was totaled.

It looks as though we’ve dodged Marco but Laura remains a worry. Our most plain-spoken and reliable weatherman, Eric Berger, wrote on Saturday about Laura: “[T]he models this afternoon are leaning ever-so-slightly toward Louisiana over Texas, but we’ve seen plenty of flip-flops so our confidence is quite low. If Laura were to come to Texas, we probably would begin to see its effects by Wednesday night or Thursday.”

August in childhood meant a growing sadness and anxiety you tried not to think about – the counterpart to tropical storms and hurricanes. School would resume two days after Labor Day. I liked many things about returning to the classroom but I liked summer more. The former meant regimentation and putting up with the dumb kids; the latter, freedom – to read, collect butterflies, swim, ride your bike, sleep as late as you wanted. The sentence quoted at the top was written by the painter Charles Burchfield in his journal on this date, Aug. 23, in 1926. He goes on:

“In this dignity & power exist simultaneously a sinister quality, and a deeply mystical one. On one hand in point of time, is the luxuriant beauty of full-growing things, on the other, the lucid romanticism of Autumn. An August might be mysterious, and has something terrifying about it – the black night following the hot misty white day, is broken by nervous flashes of heat lightning, dancing in the dark northern sky. Trees become huge black abstract masses.”

Look on the same page at Burchfield’s watercolor titled Stormy Sky in Late August. It suggests what we might face later this week.