August is an awkward month. Big Bluestem colors the prairie in blueish purple glory, and Monarchs flit from flower to flower. Yet, as blossoms fade, a prairie ages. Brown creeps in where green once resided.

Bird species begin to congregate, moving across the Bluestem landscape, grabbing onto a spindly, windblown lunch. In some wetlands white cranes work the shallows for edible tidbits, and in others, algae blooms in various colors as the heat energizes nutrients from agricultural sediments. These colors are not of the recent summer.

An nearby prairie in its last grasp of summer glory …

We humans are wont to quickly pass all of this color and naturalness of the prairie en route to our final moments on the lake shores of the Shield before schools open. Paths are charted across the former prairie for cross country running competition, and beyond the Bluestem, footballers aim for measures of Friday night glory. Teachers are called to their classrooms in preparation of the upcoming school year. 4H’ers are nervously awaiting judges at the State Fair down in St. Paul, hoping for the success they had back home at the county fairs.

Apples ripen. Peaches arrive from afar for canning. Beans are past picking, yet the tomatoes, with the cooling nights, offer garden color. Squash ripen, too, and the sizzle of deep pressure canners emit from many kitchens as people work to save summer.

Smoke-filled skies offer interesting sunsets, framed by prairie sunflowers and Big Bluestem.

Ah, yes. Summer. August is the last of summer; the threshold of autumn. Or, in the words of poet Sylvia Plath, “The odd uneven time.”

I most notice the light, on the waning of it in the evening, and on the other end, now I awaken to sunrises I was sleeping through just weeks ago. My Missouri-based cousins spoke just last week of the wonder of such late dusks as I wondered of how quickly it now descends across the landscape. Each with our geographic awareness. Yes, an odd, uneven time.

An algae bloom on a nearby wetland adds color to the August landscape.

Our’s was a late spring. Pasque flowers and Prairie Smoke seemed terribly late this year thanks to the deep April snows, and then summer broke right on top of it all. With it came a vengeance of heat and humidity that was so formerly distant to the south. No longer. Then the skies began to fill with hazy smoke from the wildfires out west and from Canada. Meteorologists claim the air quality was, and is, simply awful, causing respiratory problems for all ages. Personally my eyes burn, and my throat is rather raw as I work to expel in clearing my lungs. “It’s like smoking five or six cigarettes a day,” one was quoted in the Sunday daily.

All of that, yet we marvel at the “sun ball” sunsets offered only because of the smoky skies — sun balls as red as Santa’s pants, offering interesting imagery along the horizon edges of turkey-foot Bluestem and spindly prairie sunflowers. You yearn for a clear sky, and cheer even the slightest breakthrough of blue.

The “sun mottled” spotting on the fawns are narrowing and about to disappear.

Down the road wild turkey chicks are nearly indistinguishable from the adult hens, and nearly as big as those roosters that have survived the spring hunts, when they strutted so proudly on the woody hillsides with suddenly ruffled plumage. Fawns are losing their protective “sun mottled” spots that provided protection. On the clothesline, the season’s batch of swallows are being fed by hovering adults. Yet, they are soon off the line and already into acrobatic flight that is as wondrous as it is beautiful. Have I mentioned the Monarchs?

The Monarchs here on Listening Stones Farm exist in a metamorphic lifespan of a mere few feet.

The milkweed that attracted the caterpillars several weeks ago is now drying and dying. Towering above that browning death are the bright yellow blossoms of the Compass Plants, where the Monarch’s that “hatched” now flitter and dine — a metamorphic lifespan within a mere few feet!

September is now a week distant, the month many of us call the beginning of fall. Last week in the Boundary Waters the leaves had begun to turn, and along the ravines we can see the same around here. And we realize that in all ways August is a transitional month, giving forms of late beauty and life as much it takes away the same with the browning of death … an odd uneven time.