August Evening

This time of year it is lovely here to be outside as darkness falls. A typical night goes something like this. The heat of the day is dissipating, but the humidity is still visible. There is a misty haze hanging over the hay field, and an abundance of greenness. The last light filters through the trees to the west. 

The hummingbirds are vibrating the air with their aerial acrobatics as they skirmish over the impatiens. Their buzzing swerves near you, temporarily raising the hair on your arms. A catbird mews regularly, hopping from the birdbath to the brush to the fence and back. A brown creeper calls. It perches alternately on waist-high items near the house (the handle of the seesaw, the back of the wicker chair, the grill) and with it's tail erect, it cocks it's head and looks up at the stone wall of the house, searching for supper. Its short and sudden movements after insects are punctuated each time with a loud whir of wings. 

A duo of deer are grazing lazily in the hay field. You notice them because one doe stops chomping. She lowers her head and walks tentatively toward something. She is cautious and curious. Then she gets spooked and raises her tail and trots off a piece before looking intently at the same area that she had been approaching. 

And then there begin a series of rasping fox barks from the direction of the place she was headed: a "peninsula of woods" that juts out into the pasture at the top of a ravine. The fox keeps up his barking at intervals, each bark startling, strange, and other-worldly. You know that a spring surfaces at the head of that particular gully and cascades over shelving rock in a small waterfall, and you imagine him sitting near the top of the falls on his haunches, raising his head from time to time to croak out his strange cry.

After a time, a vixen begins her wailing response. It sounds like a frail woman lamenting in the distance. She cries over and over again. He adds his harsh squall to her sad song intermittently as the bird calls and movements gradually cease, the insects seem to get louder and louder, and the light continues to dim. 

You scan the edge of the field along the woods in the twilight and can barely make out two frolicking shapes circling one another in the shadows. And then, even as you strain your eyes, darkness falls, and you see them no more. You are in the night with the bugs' sounds assaulting your ears, thinking of how very many insects there must be to make so much noise, wondering if the foxes were only a dream, and considering going inside, as soon the 'possum and 'coon will make their rounds past the very place where you stand.