Seeds in a dry pod

The husks of butterfly weeds have split and spilled their soft insides. Downy stuff clings to their pods in feathery clusters, newly fledged and waiting on the wind. They drift in the high grass, through asters and bee balm, a seed rain in a dry season.

And I am also like those seeds in a dry pod, waiting for release, or rebirth, as the wheel turns.

There is an almost centrifugal pull on my spirit as the seasons shift, riding out at the end of my tether with the equinoctial sun. Everything is in motion — coming and becoming — like the children who pass my house on their way to school, or the butterflies that pause by the cardinal flowers in my backyard.

I may decide to lie out in the hammock beneath the backyard maple tree, but if I look up into the canopy I will see the veins of the worn-out leaves and know that the sweet corn days of summer are drawing to a close. I become impatient, hungry for the rich warm tones of autumn, and ready to get on with it.

Autumn in New England is our great consolation for all that ice and mud and our foreshortened spring. Those early leaves turning now are the first notes of the dance, the approach of distant thunder out of sight behind the mountains. I can feel the tension in my bones, sinews taut and expectant. I can feel the thrum of my quickened heartbeat, standing still.

I want to rise up on broad wings and wheel out over the valley with the kettling hawks. And I want another week of garden basil before the first and final frost, and the warm taste of the sun to linger in the last of my tomatoes. It is hard to let go, and harder still to resist what comes to us all, in time.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.

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