Quickweed, clearweed, bindweed, knotweed, royal standard hosta full bloom, the Red Baron hosta budded now. Late tips of blue veronica, late golden Heliopsis. Full ironweed and black-eyed Susan, decaying rudbeckia, last petals of red, white and violet phlox, the end of Resurrection lilies, bright roses, strong but diminishing rose of Sharon. Faded purple coneflowers, gray Joe Pye weed, brown oak-leaf hydrangea flowers, rebloom of Queen Anne’s lace, and butterfly bush. Peach and apple trees straining under the weight of their fruit. Cicadas and starlings calling from the trees. Dozens of cabbage butterflies, a few monarch butterflies and tiger swallowtails, painted ladies, giant swallowtail. Patches of yellow on the white mulberry, honeysuckle full of hops

Inventory, August 31, 2008

EPHEMERIS FOR THE FIFTHWEEK OF LATE SUMMER
The Monarch Butterfly Moon waxes all week, entering its second quarter on September 7 at 9:04 a.m. Rising in the afternoon and setting in the evening, this moon will be overhead in the late afternoon and early evening.

Venus is in Virgo with Mars this month, barely visible along the eastern horizon before sunrise. Saturn precedes the dawn in Leo, and Jupiter lies in the western evening sky with Sagittarius, setting by the middle of the night.

TAKING STOCK
At the end of August, I took inventory of what was happening around the yard and in the alley. When I compared my notes with the observations from the same day in previous years, I found that little had changed one year to the next.

My seasonal inventories are like that. They often recreate the past; sometimes they also heighten my awareness of the present and give me a feel for the future. The repetitions of events reinforce a sense of grounding. They bring few surprises or disappointments.

This year, someone asked me if I could give an excuse for my listings, some practical application for writing down the same phenomena August after August. I made up a response on the spur of the moment about the metaphoric quality of all nature, but later I thought about Einstein’s statement about insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And so then I asked myself: What is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results - even being excited at the same results?

Fifty years ago, I was always hungry for new sensations. I did everything I could just to do it, just because it was different from what I had done before. These days, I find novelty in repetition. I am glad to find the same plant in the same place blooming at the same time year after year. I am glad to hear the cicadas and the katydids summer after summer.

If each year is generally like the previous year, next year may well be the same as this year. But I am never completely sure, and so I live in a low-grade state of cosmological suspense. There is much at stake, it seems to me, in tracking the recurrence of the most common events; maybe even sanity is at stake.

And there is always compensation enough in doing the experiment one more day. Each time, I am reassured and reaffirmed by the results: I can know at least a portion of the future. It is a place I have visited before. It is familiar ground. It is home.