The summer went by so quickly, and now the first days of September have presented themselves, in grey, damp scarves that threat of dark evenings. The garden birds, unused to falling water, are learning how to ride the wind. They realise that they no longer need to clean their feathers in the dry soil anymore. Their bird shaped dents in the dust, are fading.
Is there anything as nostalgic as September breezes?
Especially after a summer of funerals, fires, urban tragedies and loss. Summer is meant to be filled with ice cream and long evenings at the beach, with the setting sun as the clock. There are not supposed to be tears in August.
This life is short.
It makes no sense to hoard all our pebbles to ourselves, be mean spirited or unkind. If there is an afterlife, we need to be accountable for our days here. If there is no afterlife then it’s even more important to tend well, while we breathe.
The young birds in the garden are learning about rain, after the drought, while we shake our heads and try to make sense of it all.
This August in Ireland another car filled with teenage boys died sudden, violent deaths, after slamming into another car of people going to the airport for their holidays. The boys drove the wrong way on purpose, so it was a type of suicide, encouraged by having nothing much to lose.
All the adults stand by and say, “this sorrow I blame on social media” because they can’t blame rock’n roll music and video nasties, anymore. Some adults observe the heavier breadcrumbs, as these boys (now dead) are forever hated.
Loss feels wrong in summer.
It feels wrong to sit outside a funeral and notice the smells of cut-crass, suncream and a distant barbeque. The blue skies over the mourners, dressed in black.
And fires too: set off by other boys, with no one to guide them. The villagers blame the parents and the fact that young men will always be wild. Can we bear to lift the mirror up to selves?
How did we not mind them better? Keep them more carefully, teach them wisdom, and how to keep well? It is us who left the matches out, left the vehicle unattended, built enormous chasms that cannot easily be marched over.
If not us, then who?
It begins with the sentence, “we could have done better”.
So this September breezes come, and they will go too. Its distance travelled can be light. The tomatoes ripen, the birds re-visit, the sky changes shape. We are here now, we live, we breathe and we are extraordinary.
Its ever-changing beauty is for us.
Shorter than me 