Goldenrod Season

Summer lingers longer here in the South Georgia Coastal Plain. That wet, sticky heat that so defines life here in all its green urgency. It’s the kind of heat that draws the gnats out of the decaying vegetation rotting into the sandy soil. The kind of heat that lends itself so to growing things. Its not for everyone, but life loves it here, and it seems our gangling summers are reluctant to give up the ghost.

               I’m mowing the grass short between the tree rows of the orchard in preparation for the approaching pecan harvest. From the tractor seat, I notice a familiar plant growing at the field edges and along the ditches of the road. It is beginning to bloom and attract attention. Scoliid wasps, a species of parasitic digger wasp, are rising from the soil to crawl drunkenly over the bright, yellow blooms. The flower heads of goldenrod mark the rich impending season of autumn, so brief and subtle in this part of the world. In other places, spring is the season of relief, bringing warmth after the lengthy cold winter. Here where summer’s heat rages in full force for eight months of the year, that season of relief is the fall. It’s a brief period of reward for enduring the summer’s wrath. But, before its arrival, there is the goldenrod season, a time of transition.

               The goldenrod bloom coincides with the sudden arrival of cool nights and mornings, days bathed in golden light. The wretched humidity has fallen and the hazy summer sky turns crisp and clear, the color of bluebird eggs shells. The gnats disappear for a time. We can once again enjoy the outdoors free of the constant barrage swarming our noses and eyes.  We can stop blowing air out of the corners of our mouths to disperse them and take deep gulps of air without risk of swallowing eye gnats in the process.

               Brown headed nuthatches, uniquely southern birds, zig and zag up and down the pine trunks, feasting on the abundant insects of late summer. The bobwhite’s fading call rings out across the fields in the evenings, as native a tongue to this place as “ya’ll” or “fixin’-to”. Soon the blue grosbeak, white-eyed vireo, summer tanager, yellow-billed cuckoo, and great-crested flycatcher, all so proud and vocal throughout summer, will take wing, following the warmth further south. They will be replaced by yellow-rumped warblers, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, flickers, kestrels, Northern Harriers, and eventually sandhill cranes to light our short winter days.

               An earthy fragrance rolls over the countryside as peanuts are liberated from the soil in which they’ve incubated all summer. The vines are turned up in long, neat rows and are drying in the sunlight. I could awaken from a coma to smell these thick waves of the land’s breath and know that autumn is near.

               The cotton bolls are open to the tops of the plants standing in the fields. Their brief white blooms colored up pink in mid-summer, then dried and fell weeks ago, leaving the bolls behind to do the work of growing the fiber that now shines white through the fading canopy of leaves. Soon the odor of cotton defoliant will blend with the aroma of freshly-dug peanuts as daredevil crop dusters take to the sky and coat the fields with ethylene, a plant hormone. This will cause the leaves to purple and crinkle, and then fall, leaving the fields blanketed as white as any fresh snowfall up North.

               It is a magnificent time to be a crow. They flock back and forth from peanut fields to the orchards, where the shucks of the earliest maturing pecan varieties are beginning to split open, exposing the nuts inside. The black-shrouded hordes seem unsure of where to focus their attentions, astounded by the sudden bounty before them. Like the crows, butterflies—gulf fritillaries, swallowtails, zebra longwings, and skippers flutter en masse to the purple verbena blooming along the field edges in a last flurry of activity before the season’s bloom ends with the first frost of November.

               The striped and hybrid bass are beginning to fill the creek and river channels submerged under the waters of Lake Blackshear, churning the surface with schools of open mouths. They stick to these aquatic superhighways this time of year to stay close to the baitfish that will feed them through the winter months. Fisherman in small boats and kayaks troll the channels slicing the water’s surface with lines bearing jigs, spoons, and rooster tails to coax out the fishes’ aggressive feeding instinct.

               In the woods, it is still warm enough for the trees to retain their dark green palette, hiding a secret world behind their tannic and curing leaves. The first tulip poplar and sycamore leaves fall, worn and tired from their year of work. They spiral to the ground in patches of sunbeam. The fruit clusters of American beautyberry glow neon purple along its tall, bushy stems. The first acorns of the swamp chestnut oaks begin to fall in the creek bottoms, calling the squirrels, deer, turkeys, racoons, and wild hogs to the feast. Golden silk spiders, the size of my pocket knife, balance with spindly legs on the webs they stretch across paths in the woods.

All these signs upon this quiet land point to the approaching season of rest. At 52, I can identify with these waning days of summer. The year is drawing to its close but the leaves remain green around me. The goldenrod blooms, the smell of fresh-dug peanuts and cotton defoliant, the swapping out of the birds, the urgency of crows and insects, the feeding schools of fish, are like the first threads of grey in my hair, the aching in my ankles as my feet hit the floor each morning, or the blurring lines on a printed page. It is a bittersweet time. The remembrance of youth is fading but still alive. There are still things to be hoped for. It is the season of summer’s longing before the winter’s cold. It is the goldenrod season.