We are in a soft season, which began with the blooming of golden jessamine in the Deep South during the northern deep winter, and it has spread across the country, past days
of early and middle and late spring and early summer, past seasons of snowdrops and trilliums and the season of flowering trees and of iris and peonies and lilacs.
So jessamine has brought us to the time of frogs calling in the ponds and wetlands, into morning birdsong and the arrival of fledgling birds and the season of butterflies and the season of lightning bugs mating in the dark, and to so many more seasons, the season of parsnips drying in the sun, the season of soft mullein and of daddy longlegs hiding in the shade of snakeroot.
There is chaos in the litany of jessamine. The fruits of that process are arbitrary, dependent on where and when we look. Still, they are the anchors of space and time, and require no artificial intelligence to understand, only the mind and body touching the essential fragments, the building blocks of deep summer.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with more notes on the seasons. In the meantime, while there are so many parts of summer, one may be enough for you today.
