August is exceptionally hot this year, the rivers so low they can be crossed by foot. In the woods, streams have dried to rock beds. In Montpelier, the state’s tiny capital, I walk by a store with bright bowls in the window and think, My mother would love this store. She passed over a year ago, and yet I still catch myself thinking that she might appear around a corner, her purse tucked under her arm, amused at me. Of course I’m not gone…

My father, the physicist, schooled his three kids early on about entropy. In a week where things repeatedly broke — the hot water heater leaking, the Jetta refusing to start in the rain — he made jokes that we were in a High Entropy Zone. So, this lovely August, with the chorusing crickets and the waning red moon — I’m determined to suck each day to its marrow. Sandwiched around work and the steadiness of washing dishes and so on, I’ve pushed aside space for swimming and ice cream, for lying under the apple tree and studying a spider spin her web. The entropy of living keeps on, as it does.

In the years when I was raising my own young daughters, our days zigzagged from bowls of blueberries to bath time. The days were endless, and the years rushed by. Now, my girls newly grown, I relish the silence and crave their company. Lucky I am, so lucky, to be alive this summer, this month, these days. All day long, I walk around with my tender heart cradled in my hands, wounded and raw from cancer, from weeks of hospitalization, from the knife of mortality pressed against my windpipe. August: the season of great loveliness, the intimation of winter. The reminder to love where and what we are.

Hitch Hiker at a Truck Stop

The hitch hiker asks to look at

the palms of my cold hands

and thanks me for unfolding them

on the frost-edged

picnic table between us.

While I look at his downcast eyes

trying to see if he sees,

nearby truckers stare

at his narrow face,

long blond hair.

He asks me if I garden,

rips a scrap of newspaper

and folds it up

into a tiny origami

package for anise seed.

Here, he says,

seed I gathered in Oregon,

plant it in Colorado.

I always have a garden, he adds,

I plant and leave to others.

He tells me he has no sex;

when you ride in the righthand seat,

you have to nod your head

without listening.

Face pressed to the window,

he can see the lacquered edges

of the earth.

So I imagine him 

practicing calligraphy

on truck windows,

recommending honey and vinegar

in a glass of water

every morning.

Mad, mad, mad.

A yellow warbler,

the moon at the bottom of the stream.

Out on the highway

he is raising his thumb again. ~ Mary Crow