Wine Grapes, Jefferson Vineyards

It didn’t get truly hot here until recently. Until now it’s been a cool, wet summer, good for growing things. The vineyards are fat, and the hayfields are well on the way to a third cut of the season.

Now it’s hot, though; the kind of hot that makes you walk and talk slow like a Southerner, fanning yourself in the shade of the porch where there might be a breeze as evening comes, when the throbbing of cicadas gives way to crickets and katydids, and fireflies rise with a common pulse, squeezed from deepening shadows like last hot drops of sunlight.

Standing under a cedar tree at dusk, I listened to the sad trill of a screech owl at the edge of the woods, which here means the summer is more than half gone.