a prelude for august

When I was younger, I had a few very bad Augusts, and for a while that rather spoiled the month for me. It doesn't help, I suppose, that August is high summer, that time of year when the heat of the sun seems interminable, when everything is too hot, when the promise of autumn seems an eternity away. Except, well, this year--as last year, as I'm looking back on what I'd written then--August started with clouds. July was fairly cool, too, which was a sharp relief from the overwhelming heat that brought June to a close.

As fond as I am of trying to find an analogy, to describe the state of the world with the state of the weather, it's poetry rather than mysticism that drives me to this. There are weather events that seem all too fitting--I'll always remember the bitter cold at my uncle's funeral--but there are also beautiful days full of disasters, terrible storms that coincide with wonderful news. And perhaps there is some poetic resonance in an oddly temperate month following a disastrous heat wave--surely many of us have convinced ourselves that the pandemic is over, that we're in that temperate month now, that the disastrous waves of COVID-19 are done and gone.

One of the things that consistently frustrates me is how, consistently through this pandemic, we've let up as soon as things start showing signs of improvement. Lockdown restrictions eased not when numbers were controllable but when the numbers were improving. I very much doubt that epidemiologists suggested this; this seems like it was engineered to give the illusion that our public officials are constantly acting to protect us.

The thing is, you don't let up when it looks like you're about to win; you keep the pressure on. We could have held out until new cases were effectively gone, then we could have put infrastructure in place to locate and isolate new cases, to do contact tracing . . . the potential was there. Now numbers are spiking again--this post-vaccination wave is already our third highest peak--and the governor is suggesting that maybe people consider wearing masks if they feel like it. It's frustrating, and all the more frustrating because of how expected it all is.

Still, August may be high summer, but it's also the last real month of summer. One more month of heat to weather before September comes in with rain and cool air, ready to once again breathe life into the world. Something, at least, to look forward to. August deserves some credit for that, I think. One last chance for summer, and then, at long last, relief.