It is still very much summer. The tomatoes are finally doing something, although not nearly enough to justify the amount of time I have spent thinking about tomatoes since February. The dahlias are just opening. The peaches are small and absurdly good and fall to the ground with a thump every few minutes. The whole yard smells warm and a little overripe. But the light has changed.
One evening after putting James to bed I went outside and the yard looked different. The sun was lower than I expected it to be, cutting sideways through the garden instead of pouring straight down into it. The shadows from the trees stretched across the grass.
August 2023 is when Daisy got sick, and September is when doctors found the brain tumor. April is the month people remember, which makes sense. April is when she was born and April is when she died. For a while I thought September would be the hard part. Except that isn’t how this works. First it was September, then the last few days of August, then somehow the entire summer has gotten involved, because by then something was already wrong inside my four-year-old and I didn’t know it yet.
Every year I end up back in those days. I know them now. There is the same slant of light through the trees and the same late-summer insects screaming themselves hoarse in the grass. The same evenings beginning, almost imperceptibly, to close in. The same hush that's come over the birds—all that spring noise used up before I noticed it going.
And somewhere in another August, there I am—or a version of me I can still see perfectly but can’t quite imagine being anymore, going about her life with no idea what September contains. She is carrying James around most of the day, with Daisy pulling her by the hand. She’s seeing friends and picking flowers and making birthday plans and probably thinking about whatever stupid thing she was thinking about, because why wouldn’t she be.
I want to warn her—of course I do. I want to appear in the kitchen while she’s unloading the dishwasher or looking for someone’s shoe and say: Pay attention. Something is wrong. Go now. Ask again. Make them look harder. Don’t let anyone tell you to wait.
I want to tell her everything, I want to dump all of it into her lap—every single thing I know now, because surely if she knows then she can do something with it. Surely that’s the point of knowing.
But she’s going to know anyway. Very soon she is going to know more than she ever wanted to know about any of it. She will learn a whole vocabulary she’s never needed. She will learn how to read doctors’ faces before they speak. She will learn the sounds of the machines and when the medications are due and what it feels like when the phone rings at an hour when phones shouldn’t ring. She is going to have so much fucking information.
So maybe I don’t want to run into that August and start shouting. Maybe I want her to have the afternoon.
Let her get the groceries and let her unload the dishwasher. Let her be irritated about something completely unimportant and not know that it is unimportant. Let her put Daisy to bed without memorizing it while it’s happening. Let Daisy just be four.
Nobody in that room needs to know yet.
As this August goes on, I know it will start coming back in order—the symptoms, the fear, the hospital, the surgery, the pathology, the first time I understood what was happening and then all the other times I understood it again.
And meanwhile, James is still waking up wanting cheesy eggs and to know where the moon goes in the daytime, and the chickens still need to be let out and later locked back up, and I keep finding peaches in the grass and tomatoes that need to be picked right now because if I leave them another day they’ll split.
But today is not September. Today the dahlias are opening and there are tomatoes on the counter.
The light is changing.
🪱 COMPOST FOR THE SOUL
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.
—Willa Cather, My Ántonia
🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH
The X-Fowls
On Wednesday morning, the chickens would not shut up. Not normal chicken noise—I know normal chicken noise, and this wasn’t that. Normal chicken noise is a steady background arrangement of clucks, complaints, egg announcements of varying length, and the rooster occasionally screaming because a branch moved or nothing did.
This was different. For hours, the yard sounded like a town hall conducted entirely in chicken. I brought them the morning news. They didn’t seem satisfied. Louder clucks. I asked what they wanted from me. I tried reason. Then overripe peaches. Then mealworms. They clucked even louder.
Checking the feeder would have solved this in about four seconds, but I wasn’t ready for a four-second morning.
Eventually I went inside. The clucking continued. Then, after several minutes, I realized I was in the basement doing laundry and there was nary a chicken within earshot.
Reader, I was hearing phantom clucks.
This felt like a new stage in our relationship and a deterioration in mine with reality.
Then, my friend Carrie—who does not own chickens and therefore had no idea what she was setting in motion—reminded me that there was a partial solar eclipse that afternoon and the Perseid meteor shower that night.
Carrie had simply mentioned two astronomical events. I heard: Have you considered that the chickens are responding to space?
Naturally I needed to know more, so I did what any responsible poultry keeper would do and went online looking for a rabbit hole about celestial events activating chickens that I could climb into and furnish.
After a long conversation with Google’s AI chatbot, which responded to “could the chickens be reacting to the eclipse” with the exact level of enthusiasm I was hoping for, I found the kind of information I frankly should not have been given: there was actual research.
Apparently, birds do behave differently during eclipses. Their calls change, their rhythms change, and their whole little sense of what time it is gets scrambled. Science says this is because of the sudden change in light.
I bet.
The Perseids were also peaking that night, under a new moon—which felt relevant in a way I wasn’t prepared to defend. There was no evidence that meteor showers affect chickens, but there was also no “evidence” that my chickens were involved in anything remotely celestial until I heard them screaming all morning, so I think we can all agree the literature has some catching up to do.
Chickens are, taxonomically-speaking, dinosaurs—a widely accepted fact I have simply chosen to use irresponsibly. It didn’t seem impossible that some ancient reptile alarm had gone off in their little walnut brains at the approach of unusual activity in the sky. It’s a phenomenon their ancestors have some history with.
To summarize the evidence:
The moon passed between Earth and the sun.
Earth passed through a trail of debris left by a comet.
My chickens had been yelling since dawn.
Chickens are modern, witchy dinosaurs.
Correlation established.
At this point, I began reviewing the flock for occult behavior I should have noticed sooner. Feather Locklear screams before sunrise every morning, which I had always understood as crowing but was now willing to consider part of his role in keeping the sun operational. Earlier this week, Benechick Cumberbatch threw up a slug in full view of the entire flock, me, and Lady—an event I had filed under Things I Regret Witnessing and was now reclassifying as Ritual. Eggward Norton has no discernible personality, which suddenly seemed less reassuring than it once had. For years, Hen Affleck has been producing long, elaborate clucks with what I can only describe as syntax. And Emily Chickinson routinely disappears alone into the dark nesting box for extended periods, apparently to send or receive correspondence.
I had been living among signs this whole time.
By late morning, I had developed a basic protocol: count the chickens before and after the eclipse. There should still be five. If there are six, do not immediately try to figure out which one is new. Do not draw protective symbols in the dirt. Keep Benechick away from reflective surfaces. If Hen begins one of her extremely long clucks, let her finish.
I watched the clock. I watched the flock. I watched the sky.
And I refilled the feeder.
🌹 BLOOM REPORT
Hydrangea—Fully in its late-summer paper phase.
Allium—Planted for structure, which is gardener language for I wanted a bunch of purple balls floating around for no practical reason.
Dahlia—Cornel Bronze. Easily stood there for five minutes before cutting it.
Morning glory—Self-seeded and annexing part of my fence, but producing flowers pretty enough to complicate the case against it.
🥕 PICK ME DIRTY
Cropaganda
I picked this enormous, partially blushing beast of a Brandywine because after watching several other tomatoes split on the vine, I’ve become extremely conservative about tomato risk. He is now in what I refer to as the tomato shoebox, because it is literally a shoebox where tomatoes go to finish ripening.
This was yesterday, and I’ve already checked on him several times today. Nothing has happened—he remains approximately three tomatoes fused together, with one red ass cheek and no concern for my tomato timeline.
Plan: wait until the rest catches up and then eat him with as little interference as possible—salt, maybe bread. It feels disrespectful to put a tomato that has accomplished this much into a recipe.
Meanwhile, the peach tree has reached the point where fruit is falling faster than I can develop a coherent system for fruit falling from a tree. Sometimes I can hear it from inside the house. (Phantom thumps?) Sometimes I’m standing underneath it when it happens, which has introduced a small but meaningful element of personal danger to peach season.
The peaches themselves are incredible—heavy, warm from the sun. They operate on a roughly fifteen minute schedule between not quite ready and belonging to a wasp. I go outside for one and come back with six tucked into the front of my shirt, and eat them standing at the counter with juice running down my chin.
I know it looks like I’m transporting roofing materials, but no. These are collard greens. They were harvested the same evening as the peaches. The resulting still life looks like provisions packed for a fairy-tale evacuation.
Plan: collards cooked down with garlic. Peaches eaten standing up, and made into pie if they survive long enough. Current odds favor standing up.
🤯 WHAT IF I’M THE INVASIVE SPECIES?
Ott of Control
Last year I put in half a packet of Grandpa Ott’s morning glory seeds along the west side of the garden fence. The real Grandpa Ott handed his granddaughter seeds in a pill box before he died, which helped inspire an entire seed-saving nonprofit. A touching multi-generational story of preservation that has ended, at least on my property, in infrastructure failure.
Grandpa Ott came back this year uninvited, in numbers, and didn’t so much as climb the fence as retire it. In fairness to the vine: the fence is chicken wire, put up several summers ago by a stoner whose structural ambitions began and ended at “roughly vertical.” It was never built to survive a heritage variety with something to prove.
There is now an eight-foot stretch of fence upholstered in morning glory, more green than advertised. The purple’s in there. Trust me. The whole thing looks less like a fence than a witch’s privacy screen.
🪰 PEST SUPPORTING ACTOR GOES TO…
The Very Horny Caterpillar
I found this tobacco hornworm on one of my tomato plants, enormous and pale green and folded into himself like a very expensive accordion.
Technically, he is a pest. He is also velvety, spectacularly fat, equipped with a tiny red horn, and has those gold-rimmed little portholes down his sides. He was eating a tomato leaf in broad daylight with no sense that we might have competing interests.
I probably should have removed him. Instead I stood there for ten minutes looking at his little feet.
Left alone, he’ll become a Carolina Sphinx moth—out at dusk, hovering in place near flowers with a tongue built like a party favor, uncoiling to reach nectar nothing else can get to. They favor the same deep, tube-shaped flowers I’ve been fussing over all summer—nicotiana, evening primrose, moonflower. There's a chance that the thing eating my tomato plant is next month's moonflower pollinator, doing me a favor I haven't earned yet.
Anyway, he can have a leaf. Maybe two.
Welcome, fellow traveler!
🌱 WAITING FOR GROWDOT
Much Ado About Nothing Yet
This is my third summer trying to grow moonflowers. They have now scaled the blue trellis, leaves the size of my hand, winding themselves around the metal with all the confidence of a plant that intends to come through for me—eventually. Every evening I go out looking for a bud. Every evening: leaves. Beautiful leaves. Tremendous leaves.
No moon.
Not to make this about me, but I’ve provided them with an eight-foot portal, a meadow, August, and an unreasonable amount of emotional investment. They have provided me with foliage. Meanwhile, I have now pardoned a tobacco hornworm on the possibility that he may someday become the moth that pollinates these flowers that have not yet agreed to exist.
Apparently, I was misreading the situation. Moonflowers are short-day plants, which means they don’t flower until the nights are long enough. Up here, the long summer days can keep them climbing and leafing out for weeks, giving every indication that something is about to happen without actually producing the thing they were invited here to produce.
The vine has been running its own calendar this whole time—one that has nothing to do with how much I want it and everything to do with the light quietly changing around it. Which means that for three summers I’ve basically been standing outside taking the length of the day personally.
So: no blooms yet. Nights are getting there. I’ll be at the arch.
🎧 BEET DROPS
Blood Orange — “It Is What It Is”
For the last stretch of evening when nobody needs anything from you. Loose, a little woozy. No lessons. It is what it is.
Not a flock, a coven. I knew it.
Your substack means something to me that I can’t really describe but I am so grateful for you and it.