CLINGING TO SUMMER

Summer arrived late in Minnesota this year. Our tougher than usual winter seemed to drag on till mid-June, as if ten feet of ground frost were slowly seeping out. With days still cool and wet, rivers stayed high, gardeners put off their much-anticipated plantings, and muddy fields threatened to swallow tractors whole.

PHOTO: Phil Champion - http://www.philchampion.co.uk/

Eventually, though, summer did manage to take hold as it always does, and the profusion of rich, saturated color, though a few weeks late, sprouted and spread over the grateful landscape. How I love all those shades of breathing green, the blankets of true, dense blue from early-blooming Siberian squill, the piercing reds of geranium and canna!

I made up my mind...to see all these wonders of color, texture and pattern as if I'd never seen anything like them before.

As this shortish summer strove to make up for lost time, I made up my mind—as my posts here on One Man's Wonder and in the social media implore—to see all these wonders of color, texture and pattern as if I'd never seen anything like them before. Perhaps it was the fact of that imploring that helped me to do exactly that. I must have stopped a thousand times, as it were, to smell the roses.

But suddenly here we are; another Labor Day is history, the State Fair's come and gone, and ragweed's got me stuffing my pockets with Kleenex. At least symbolically, summer is over. Our window box plantings sense the cooler, drier air and, seeing right through our best efforts to fool them into thinking it's still June, are starting to thin and shrivel. Everything else too—with the exception of that good old fall standby, the chrysanthemum—seems just about on its last legs.

So, as I set out on my walk along the Mississippi yesterday, I was feeling kind of melancholy, almost anticipating an experience of loss. I was already mourning all the shrinking, browning plants and spent flowers I knew I'd come across. What made me even more blue was the looming prospect of five or six months devoid of all that fresh, living, breathing color.

At least I'd have these poor excuses for the real thing to...comfort my color-starved soul till tiny buds pop once again.

Of course, this wasn't at all what I found. Summer is indeed still alive here in growing zone four. But, as if to convince myself of this, I brought my camera. At the very least, I figured, that would help me notice and appreciate even more the resolute colors of late summer.

What's more, even if the dead of winter were somehow to slam down on us tomorrow, at least I'd have these poor excuses for the real thing to document the fleeting summer of 2011 and comfort my color-starved soul till tiny buds pop once again.

I hope you'll forgive the indulgence.

PHOTOS THIS GROUP: Jeffrey D. Willius