Dear August

Dear August,

It goes without saying that we have had a long-standing love affair. You are the month that I look forward to the most, though I know you have a private little rivalry with December. Rest assured, dear one...you are both so unique, and I love you both the same amount, only differently. Like that children's book, I love you the goldest, and I love December the red-greenest.

But you're here now, my darling month, my month of coffee and amusement parks and scrapbook pages and beach sand between my toes. My month of journaling and trashy novels and too much liquor and questionable hygeine. You are indulgence and rest, fortitude and lust, a time to connect with people and shut the ringer off my phone at the least inclination.

In short, August, you fill my well of hedonistic, pleasure-centered, most base personal needs, and allow me to fill the the other 334 days with something resembling an upstanding life, one in which I seek to actively inspire the leaders of tomorrow to make the world better through Passionate Good Deeds and Industrious Effort....starting September 7th.

Till then, though, for the next four weeks, I will sleep too late, eat too much, stay up too late writing or reading or otherwise frittering the time away. I will watch Ellen and Oprah and tons of Glee reruns and all of those random movies kicking around on my DVR. (Otherwise, they'll be deleted when December's Hallmark movies begin, and I would never want to use a cinematic device to foster unnecessary jealousy between the two of you.)

August, I love you for Magical Strawberry Drink and for swimming pools, for show-tunes blasting and staying in my pajamas all the way through the shrill ladies on the View. I love you for Provincetown and Patrick's secret beach and the Marshfield Fair - my only chance to pat a cow all the year long. I love you for flip-flops, sun-dresses, and a lack of accountability, and if I don't straighten up my house and load the dishwasher until 4:45, just in time for Patrick to get home, well...that's our little secret, isn't it? You don't mind, and you will keep my worst habits under your floppy straw hat. I love you for that, too.

I love you for not judging me when my children watch far too much Scooby Doo, and I love you for the chance to take them to the library and buy them shiny new school sneakers. (Though not yet, August! I'm not even close to ready yet. But I know that when I am, you'll support me through that as well. August, you're so versatile.)

So thank you in advance, my sunflower beauty, bursting with fresh blueberries and queen anne's lace and a chance to pick up four of the 71 novels piled into the "Friends I Haven't Met Yet" shelf in the Athenaeum. Thank you for thunderstorms and fireflies and fried oreos at the downtown street fair.

August, our affair will be brief and brilliant - blazing, even - and when you leave me, I will do my fair share of huddling and shaking and eating too much Ben and Jerry's while I write class lists into my rank book. I will lament your passing in pages and pages of simpering prose in my spiral notebook, and eventually, when I'm shopping for Halloween costumes and buying things that smell like cinnamon, I will be able to think of you with a wistful tenderness, instead of the fierce, devotional obsession I feel today.

Firmly planted in the moment after a gin-and-tonic-with-extra-lime,
KMHB