Ain’t No Cure for the End of Summer Blues

One of my daughter’s favorite words is petrichor, which is the smell of rain after a dry spell. Rain on a dusty road. Rain on withered grass. Rain interacting with the oils on plants and in the ground and, sometimes, mixing with ozone during a lightning storm. You don’t smell rain when it falls from the sky. And you don’t smell it when it’s been raining a while, say in November. But in late summer, after a long dry spell? That’s petrichor—a word that was invented in 1964 by two Aussie scientists who coined the phrase as a combination of the Greek words for rock (petra) and the blood of gods (ichor).

My wife is partial to crepuscular. Your cat is crepuscular. Any creature that becomes active around twilight is crepuscular. In high school, my friends and I were often crepuscular, especially in the summertime once we got our driver’s licenses. To me, the most intriguing time of day at the local fair is dusk, when the lights on the carnival rides begin to take possession of the midway, the air gets thinner and shadows blend into ephemera. Cats on the prowl and riders on the Tilt-a-Whirl are crepuscular emanations in the waning day.

The odd thing about crepuscular is that it seems as if it should be onomatopoeic (another great word), but it’s not. I expect it to describe something tortoise-like, with a hard shell or carapace. I expect it to have an etymology that combines muscular with creep. But really it’s just a Latin derivative for “twilight” (crepusculum). So rather than being onomatopoeic, it’s mostly taxonomic. Whatever the case, my cat doesn’t care.

Recently, I came upon the word serotinal, which means late summer. It can be used for certain kinds of plants that bloom at this time of year. It can also suggest a feeling of melancholy as the summer winds down. A serotinal nostalgia, for instance. And it sounds like a new pharmaceutical you might ask your doctor about. Feeling overly wistful? Experiencing extreme cases of longing? Try Serotinal! (Side effects may include nausea related to the consumption of fair snow cones, a soul-crunching lack of drive to clean the gutters before October, and excessive remembering of one’s halcyon days. If remembering persists longer than four hours, call your doctor.)

No other season ends with such pensiveness. Fall turns to winter right around the time the holidays kick in and the first snows arrive. Winter ends with spring, and the last snow of the year is rarely mourned. Spring turns to summer, and school is out, vacations commence, and shorts and flip-flops rule the day. And summer does what at the end? It falls, and we are booted out of Eden.

There is usually a point, however, at which summer begs us to leave it behind. If the heat has been excessive, the air muggy or filled with the smoke of regional wildfires, it’s time for a change.

And, now, the air is clearing. School has started. Autumn scratches at the door like a hungry cat.

To be sure, green still clings to the trees, as the sun vectors toward another equinox. Summer has but a few days left, and there’s a serotinal feeling in the air, bearing with it a certain trepidation about what the fall might (or might not) bring.

Webbing Season

Three spiders have parked off the front porch like gillnetters waiting for a run of salmon, their webs strung between the gutter and an azalea bush. They wait patiently—patiently in the human world, at least—for whatever might come their way.

The increased presence of such webs coincides with the changing season. The nights cool, the dew returns to the grass that had baked into a tawny hide during a rainless summer. Just this week the rain returned, yet the land still looks parched. A row of hydrangeas has survived well enough, some of the flowers still the color of Siamese cat eyes. From the porch, you can look at them and the barn, which houses a riding mower and a chicken coop with an attached pen. I haven’t been out there much lately because I haven’t needed to mow in two months, and the chickens are all gone, now. Gone to coyotes. Gone to raccoons. We didn’t replenish them this spring, after losing the last hen to the predatory nature of her egg-bound body.

And yet I know what’s out there in the erstwhile chicken pen, all the weeds that have colonized the ground since the chickens vanished. A butterfly bush has migrated inward, somehow finding its way to the other side of a huge cedar stump. Dandelions, prickly hawthorn stalks, Himalayan blackberries, sow thistle—each has staked a claim in this abandoned space. Once, in midsummer, I hacked down as much as possible with a machete, but it mostly came back.

One could tally a fair census of spiders out in the pen, but I hesitate to go check. For if there’s one thing I can’t abide about spiders in the fall it’s how their sticky polymer filaments seem to find just the optimal height for a surprise attack. Walking into a cobweb, in my estimation, is much more disconcerting than encountering the spider who built it. I hate the sensation that something—some invisible liquid protein spewed from an eight-legged body and acquiring a relative tensile strength greater than steel—has just attached to my nose, eyelashes, upper cheek, and ear.

The webs are more prolific this time of year because their makers have a boatload of eating and reproducing to do before they die. (Don’t we all?) Hatched in spring, these little Charlottes assume more important duties than saving some pig at the state fair. Like bats, they help suppress the insect population, which does us far more favors than we might realize. How odd, then, that as the webbing season continues into October, spiders and bats become the spooky accoutrements of Halloween, when it’s the mosquitoes, carpet beetles, and thrips of the world that cause more damage.

But here we are on fall’s doorstep, not quite ready for frost on the pumpkin. Early fall. Late September. When the sun’s trajectory shifts more noticeably southward, even though the shift has been steady all along. When the equinox levels day and night and the weather is perhaps more amenable to chores. This is a season for taking account, for battening down the hatches—cleaning gutters, clearing the roof of moss, sealing the chimney, washing the baffle on the septic tank. This is the season for projects.

Which is why I feel humbled by the industry of the garden-variety spiders (Argiope aurantia) parked off my front porch. Actually known as garden spiders (or yellow garden spiders or corn spiders or, yes, writing spiders, among other names), they display an amazing facility for engineering. They are project-oriented, writing their webs with the aptitude of coders working thirty minutes away on a different sort of web. Amazingly, spiders can tune their homes with the precision of a luthier. Each sector has a corresponding pitch so they know where to go, can respond quickly, when prey is inbound. Imagine the vibration, the hum, the symphony a spider web makes in the seconds before stinging, bundling, and, eventually, devouring.

Requiem for a housefly (Musca domestica).

Maybe these arachnids could write in human language, with the proper elements of style, if they wished. Maybe they actually could save a pig.

That would be terrific.