Here we are again in August, that sneaky golden gift of a month. Sneaky in the best way. Sneaky in that suddenly it’s here and it’s time to exhale deeply, sinking luxuriously into this month of falling apples and shooting stars. A month so delicious Taylor Swift wrote an entire song about it. Her August is an infectious, bittersweet love story, about two young people “twisted in bedsheets”, a lament for how the month of their coming together and falling apart slipped away “like a bottle of wine”.
This is a marvellous month, if you ask me. The month of my mother’s birthday. The last month of the children’s summer holidays, the final weeks before school starts and everything changes but exactly how those changes will manifest, we can’t know. I can hear the children upstairs as I write, banging cupboards and sorting through old toys, moving into their own bedrooms, preparing to sleep apart at night for the first time.
I hear them talking about plastering new posters on the walls — Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo — and putting away childish things. Can the newly minted teenagers getting ready for secondary school bear to part with the doll that was accidentally thrown in the fire that time, and still bears the scars on her blackened face? Not yet, it turns out. Not just yet.
August is the time for such conversations. For discussing the colour on the walls you’ll paint because somehow this month there’s time for these jobs you’ve been putting off.
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There is always something better to do and it feels as though there’s more time to do it
And that broken sliding door you’ve been looking at since January — well, this is somehow the month when it will get fixed. Unless the person you know can fix it has their out-of-office reply on. August is a month when you expect more than the usual amount of out-of-office replies.
Even if you’re not on holiday, there’s a holiday mindset. People understand why replies to texts are slower than usual or nonexistent.
“No need to reply,” I tend to text in August. Because there is always something better to do and it feels as though there’s more time to do it. No need to reply, an understanding that everybody has taken the foot off the pedal, is on a bit of a go-slow.
In Dublin, it feels like there are fewer people on the roads because everyone has fecked off to Brittas Bay or west Cork or Alicante or Croatia. There are fewer people on your own metaphorical road too, your head seems clearer, so it feels like you can get more done, or take your time or go a little bit faster. If you never got around to doing your summer pedicure, it won’t happen now, and sure what harm? Arrah, it’s August.
Regarding the bedroom walls, there’s a certain look that needs to be achieved. The children tell me the colours must fit the “aesthetic”, which doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Aesthetic, as far as I can make out, is an Instagram thing. A way to create an identity, a personal brand, the way I used to decorate my docs with Grolsch bottle tops and wear a lot of diamante and royal blue. Now it’s lavenders and pale yellows and light purples being talked about for the walls. The “aesthetic” is pastel as opposed to primary. If August has an aesthetic, it’s mossy greens and iris blues and burnt purples. It’s long days and longer nights. It’s firepits and flies and festivals.
It’s the time for gatherings. In Inistioge, Co Kilkenny, one of the prettiest villages in Ireland, the inaugural Keep Her Lit festival will take place the weekend after next. There’ll be music and crafts and forest walks, all dedicated to the memory of two local heroes of Irish music and culture, the musician Dave Donohoe and the publican Johnny O’Donnell.
So gather while ye may. A farmer acquaintance of mine got a brand new combine harvester and sent me a video of its first harvest, the golden corn looking like a work of art in his fingers. I was quoting words from The Combine Harvester (Brand New Key) by The Wurzels at him, in which a male farmer attempts a land grab on a woman with more acreage:
“I got twenty acres
An’ you got forty three
Now I got a brand new combine harvester
An’ I’ll give you the key”
But my farmer friend was thinking more of An Irish Harvest Day, the John Hogan version of the song:
“The roses they’re all dead and gone, around that homestead door.
The young folks are all scattered and the old ones passed away.
There’s no one left to greet me on this Irish harvest day.”
I wouldn’t have taken him for the maudlin, sentimental type, but August and the harvest bring it out in him. We all have our moments, “to every season turn, turn, turn” as the Byrds sang.
In the spirit of embracing August, I’m hanging up my own Gone Fishin’ sign on this column. I’ll be back in September with newly sharpened pencils and the best of intentions. Until then I’m slipping away into August, like a winding river or a falling star. Like a bottle of wine. Keeping her lit.