August is nearing the halfway mark. We have yet to taste the cool morning air that will arrive with the end of the month hinting that fall is a possibility. Right now we are in those days when the breezes are few and the air has the heaviness of full Southern Summer. I have a particular fondness for this last full month of the season. Many of my memory pages are full of pleasant August times when we had the last free weeks before returning to school.
I grew up on a farm. More specifically, I grew up on a farm where the main cash crop was bright leaf tobacco. That meant, briefly, that the tobacco plants required our attention from the time the seeds were sown in the bed over Christmas until the last leaf came off the sticks and was hauled off to the market in early August. What with the setting out, and the howing and the dusting and the suckering and the cropping and the stringing and the hanging in the barn and the curing and the removing from the barn and the packing down and the taking off the sticks, our lives were a little busy during the first six to seven weeks of summer. Things gradually modernized with tobacco after I escaped it, but during the fifties, crews of kids with a few adults harvested tobacco. It was long, hot, nasty work, but all the memories are not grim ones. I especially enjoyed working on other farms. After about six hours of work, we would break for noon. We were fed well, and we enjoyed each others company during the couple of hours off. It was then back to the barn or field for another four or five hours. After the last stick was hung in the barn, we would load into the farmer's truck and head for home.
My best camping memory is of a time we got to go to Lake Winfield Scott with my Aunt Jennie and Uncle Henry and their girls. Tobacco season was over and our parents let us ride up to Atlanta on the train. This in itself was a major event. We took with us a shoebox full of fried chicken and other food to eat on the way. Mama took us to Valdosta to catch the train. It was my first time riding a train and it started a lifelong love of travel that way. I must have been about twelve at the time. All our other trips to the city had been either on a Greyhound bus or in our 1946 maroon colored Ford coupe. I remember falling into conversation with a woman about Blue Springs. Our Uncle Henry picked us up at the train station and whisked up out to Winona Drive in Decatur. Over the weekend we packed up and went camping, sleeping overnight in pup tents. We had Spanish rice cooked over the open fire for supper. I still remember swimming in the cool lake waters and playing in a little pebble lined stream. The next day we went for a hike among other things. It was a fine time.
Other memories crowd the scrapbook of my mind: our vacation up through the New River area of West Virginia when we took the boys white water rafting; our trip to Canada and back through New Hampshire and down to Concord where we saw so many of the sights around our America writers; our trip back to Minot and down through Yellowstone and Colorado; our trips to Amelia Island to the beach as the boys got older.
Since we met in one August and married in the next, many of our flashes of memory surround wedding and anniversary events. Until our fifteenth anniversary, it was a tradition that Klep bring me a dozen Margarete daisies for each year of our marriage. The boys enjoyed this, but there finally came a time when there weren't enough vases in the house nor table tops to accommodate the daisies, so we retired the tradition.
Perhaps the sweetest memories of August for me are those which return to the days when I was eight or nine years old. I can still remember the sights and sounds of the magic evenings in late summer before We would have to be in bed early for school. I can feel the cool I found sitting under the draping jasmine or the wisteria vines after the dew had fallen and just watching the light leave the sky. There was magic and possibility all around. Freedom and imagination were ours for a few more precious days. It was long before the days of daylight saving time and we could be up until there was a moon in the sky and we could say "I see the moon and the moon sees me; God bless the moon and God bless me!"
The magic of August is still with me. Tonight if the skies clear, I will go out and talk to the August moon again.
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