chasing summer

Last week this here mama got severely itchy feet.  I couldn't sit still, focus on my children, enjoy all that I usually do.  I needed to go somewhere, away.  Not sure what I was looking for, I declared I needed a "mama day,"  grabbed my camera, some snacks and water, and off I drove.  First I poked around a couple of old antique stores.

I love going into these little old houses stuffed to the rafters with milk glass, door hinges, china, linens, furniture and myriad items I cannot begin to identify.  I only bought an old window this time which will be turned into a cold frame come next spring.  I thought that maybe what I'm looking for I will find in a little town (one with a good bakery, perhaps?)

I am still enchanted by the little white homes you find scattered throughout small New England towns.  They are often decorated with flower gardens, or flags like this one.  After living in the suburbs for so many years, I still think of these as "real" houses.  They have held so many lives within them.  Happy memories, sad occasions, many, many meals shared, children arriving and leaving to make their own lives.  Somehow it always seems that these houses have held onto some of the history of their inhabitants and have become just a little ensouled themselves.  I keep thinking of what stories they might tell if they could...

Well, the bakery was closed that day, so I kept on driving along winding country roads.

I stopped near a swamp.  There are places like this all over.  They always come as a little surprise, when you suddenly leave the shady forest and come out into the sunshine.  I keep hoping that one day I will see a moose in one of these spots.  But not today.

The cold water in the brooks and streams is still inviting in late August while the days are still hot.  But in the late afternoon a little chill begins to creep in, so no wading for me this time...

As I kept driving along a small road lined with an old stone wall overgrown with ferns, I kept yearning to see the sunlight slant just so through the trees.  And then I realized what I had been looking for all this time:  the last of the summer sun, still warm but already lower in the sky.  It is the kind of light you want to pocket to pull out and remember in February, this delicate brightness that brings with it long shadows and makes the time-worn deep greens of the forest so luminous and lively.  I had come all this way, driving, to load up on sunlight, the kind that we will not see again until April or May next year.  This light tells me that it's almost time to think about soups and wool socks and layers, but not quite. Summer is leaving, but I'll be holding on to every last ray of sunshine until it's gone.