Ode to Summer: We're Waiting

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Please. I'm ready for this to be done.

Oh baby, it's been a long, long time since that evening sun's come round....

You know the one I'm talking about, that later-day summer sun in the South, when the cicadas are out, yet the temperature is almost perfect. You hop in the truck to go for a ride, waving your hand out the window, riding it on the waves of air. The world smells like a stream. The sun goes down, and you walk through its afterglow, the shimmery gloaming celebrated in lightning bugs.

Lord, the warm weather can't some soon enough. I can see the table set with my mother's Pfaltzgraff tableware--cool blue Yorktowne pattern to be specific. There it is, regimented in sparkling flatware, in angles of forks and knifes burning with potential energy (more about silverware at Silverware Wikipedia, in case anyone doubted its incendiary capability).

Now the dinner plates crisscross around its length: cornbread and biscuits. Thick gray gravy, milk and sausage grease. Lima beans soaking in butter. Stewed greens. Sliced pink pounds of ham. Corn on the cob. One piece of dinnerware, for one fat tomato, cut in chunks and salted. Another for rings of a sweet yellow onion.

In the fridge a key lime pie, waiting.

And the sunlight reaching through the window.