The calendar says summer doesn’t end until late September, but in my mind, as August approaches its 31st day, we can already feel the chill of these early mornings whispering the harbinger of the fall season.

The dancing shadows that filter through the trees at the five o’clock hour of the year’s eighth month seem a bit darker against the dimming sunlight than they did in June and July. The deep green leaves are losing their hold onto the August light just like we had lost hold onto our youth before we had to surrender to the autumns of our aging years.

Patches of sunlight jigsaw across the grass, but the sky knows the dusk of the day must gradually give in to the dark of the night. Then, the stars will rise through the infinite black abyss reminding us that even in our darkest moments, these celestial lights will promise another new day.

The universe is a spectacular creation. I paid no mind to its wonders in my youth, having been too busy exhausting every ounce of my energy frolicking within its playgrounds. But now, I can take the time to appreciate its pristine majesty.

In his book, Fahrenheit 151, Ray Bradbury wrote, “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

I gaze into the sky with absolute awe and I realize what great minds have recorded their thoughts during this late summer’s pastoral portrait.

The August landscape spoke to author, Edna St. Vincent Millay about her troubling romance when she wrote, “I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”

Yet, we can still hear the voice of August throughout the long and silent colder months. Albert Camus wrote, “O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Perhaps the best description of this month comes from Natalie Babbitt inside her book, Tuck Everlasting. “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the livelong year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”

As a young boy, August meant September was looming and the dreaded school year would be forced upon me as if the days of late summer were only a dream that had tricked my mind to believe that it would never, ever leave.

I can recall sitting in a classroom on the first day of school. I looked out the window and the warm September morning was teasing my senses. “Quick! Get up and leave now,” said the monarch butterflies that fluttered at the thick, prison- like glass of the window. “Summer is still here! Come outside and play!”

And now, within the twilight of my earthly existence, I understand why Pocono Mountain tourists feed themselves with the weekends of this month like it’s the last meal they will ever eat.

The lakes are full of kayaks and pontoon boats. The wilderness trails are marked with footprints of hundreds of hikers and families ride their bicycles through the hills and valleys, making momentary memories that will vanish once the stores begin to display their Halloween merchandise.

My favorite writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson refused to accept the melancholy of the end of summer as a time of despair, saying, “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty.”

Henry David Thoreau, who spent two solitary years living in the woods at Walden Pond, said this about the departure of the season. “A fallen leaf is nothing more than a summer’s wave goodbye.”

The other day I cast a fishing line into a mountain lake and from one splash of sparkling water, my thoughts returned to summer days of my boyhood, where I dropped garden worms into a pond that was about a mile bike ride from my house.

Fishing is fun with a friend, but it’s somewhat more special when that friend is Mother Nature. She invites me to taste her invigorating air, inhale the scent of her water’s extraordinary fragrance deep within my lungs and when I reeled in a wriggling perch, I delighted in the black and yellow brilliance of its vertical colors as if its scales were a canvas painted by Michelangelo himself.

Emerson wrote about the transparent eyeball; that when we experience nature in all its glory, we are cleansed of the poisons of bias we have held against the world. We become nothing and everything at once. This cleansing brings me back to the truth of my innocence. Yesterdays no longer matter. Tomorrow never comes. All I have is this moment in time presented by a motion picture of an immortal universe that had awarded me the gift of my birth so long ago. Whatever we believe created the universe, created us, too. Emerson said, “I am part and a parcel of God!”

I am feeling that moment right now. I sit under the umbrella of the August light. I am blessed to be alive. I encourage all of us to embrace the light and its peaceful serenity.

Shut off the TV that crushes our spirit with the news of an angry and tragic humanity and step outside into the splendor of the summer swoon.

Give the universe a chance to heal us with the comfort of its love. We all come from its creator’s womb. That’s why we call her Mother Nature.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com