A Letter to August

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Posted at the turn of the month | from Nicky at The Calendar Year

July did exactly what it promised, and a few things it didn’t.

If you remember from last month, I decided to revisit The Moomins, and I have just finished reading The Moomins Midsummer Madness. It turned out to be nothing like I remembered from that slightly unsettling 1990s cartoon. Tove Jansson writes about summer the way summer actually feels – unhurried, a little magical, slightly melancholy around the edges in a way that makes it more beautiful rather than less. I finished it in the garden on a warm afternoon and felt genuinely reluctant to come back inside. Exactly the right book for July. I’m glad I gave Moominland another chance. In fact, I have just bought the box set of the books, so in months to come, I may try Moominvalley in November and Moominland Mindwinter.

The pressed flowers did not become a card or a framed thing for the kitchen. They became a small pile of pressed flowers in a book I keep meaning to do something with. Which is, as I said last month, progress of a kind.

And I did sit outside before looking at my phone. Not every morning. But enough times that I can tell you with some confidence that the garden at seven o’clock in July is a different place entirely from the garden at nine. It’s quieter. Fresher and definitely worth getting up to experience.

So here we are. August. The fullest, heaviest, most golden part of the year – and the month where, if you’re paying attention, you can already feel something beginning to shift.

What I’m Leaving Behind in July

The wildflower walk happened. It happened on a Sunday afternoon when I had no particular plan and just decided to go, which is usually how the best things happen. The verges were extraordinary – knapweed, meadowsweet, willowherb in long purple drifts. I did not manage to photograph any of it because I was too busy actually looking at it, which I’m counting as a success of a different kind.

This July was also, let’s be honest, a lot. The heatwave was the kind that doesn’t feel like a treat – the kind that sits on top of you and makes even small tasks feel like an achievement. The kind where the house doesn’t cool down at night, and you lie there thinking about autumn with something approaching longing. I love summer. I do. But there were days in July where I was genuinely dreaming of October.

And then – almost as if the season heard me – things started to shift. Walking along the canal in the last week of July, I noticed the blackberries already ripening in the hedgerows. Not quite ready, but getting there, deepening from red to dark. The sycamore helicopter seeds have appeared on the trees. And I spotted the first conkers forming = still small and spiky and green, not yet the bursting-out, polished conkers of September, but unmistakably there. It felt like the countryside was quietly getting ahead of itself. Or perhaps just being honest about where we are in the year.

I find that oddly comforting. The turn is always earlier than we think.

The Perseids build-up I mentioned last month – the meteor shower that peaks in August – gave me one very clear night in late July where I stood in the garden in the dark for twenty minutes and saw a shooting star (I definitely saw it! It wasn’t a plane’s tail light in the distance!) and felt, as promised, appropriately small. I can confirm this is a worthwhile activity and I will be doing it again.

And the Buck Moon. Did you see it? July’s full moon rose enormous and amber-coloured over the rooftops, and I stood watching it for longer than was probably sensible on a weeknight. There’s something about a summer full moon that feels ancient and unhurried – nothing like the cold brightness of a winter moon. It just hangs there, warm and enormous, completely unbothered. If you missed it, I’m sorry. If you saw it, you know exactly what I mean. July night sky / Looking Up

Wimbledon happened, as it always does, in a haze of strawberries and muggy afternoons and radio commentary drifting through the house. I said last month that sporting events mark the seasons for me as much as the flowers and the birds, and Wimbledon fortnight is one of the clearest markers of all. There’s something about the sound of tennis on the radio that makes everything feel like mid-July in the best possible way.

The raspberry bake also happened. It was a mess. It was delicious. I have no further notes.

Hello, August

August is the month that always catches me slightly off guard.

It looks like summer – full and abundant and green -, but it smells like something else. There’s a heaviness to the air in August that June never has. The light is different too: lower, warmer, more golden and more forgiving, but also more insistent about where it falls and where it doesn’t. August light is generous and a little melancholy at the same time, and I think that’s exactly why I love it.

This year, with the blackberries already coming and the sycamore seeds already spinning and that heatwave still hanging about like something we needed to recover from, August feels more like a threshold than it usually does. Not quite summer anymore. Not yet autumn. Something in between, which is perhaps its own kind of season.

The swifts will leave this month. I said in July that I was paying attention, and I mean to keep paying attention right to the end – because the day the swifts go is one of the quietest seasonal markers of the year, easy to miss, and worth noticing.

Here’s what I’m planning to pay attention to.

📖 Reading the Season

The Moomins set a high bar, so I’m being careful about what comes next. I want something that feels like August: rich, slightly overripe, full of atmosphere. I’m looking for something with a long August afternoon in it – a garden, a house with history, something where the pace matches the season rather than fighting it.

I’m also considering finally reading something I’ve been putting off because it’s long and I wanted to give it the proper time it deserves. Maybe ‘Remains of the Day’ will be a good fit for August, a time with its long light and its particular permission to do nothing particularly useful, feels like exactly the right month. August books / Reading the Season

What’s on your August reading list? Last month some of you left wonderful recommendations in the comments – keep them coming.

🌿 Out in Nature

August is when the countryside starts its slow breath out – and this year it seems to have started early. The blackberries along the canal are already coming on fast. The sycamore helicopters are on the trees. The rosehips are beginning to blush. Out in Nature this month, I want to walk the canal again properly and watch the hedgerow change week by week – because August’s edges are where the most interesting things are happening right now.

I also want to find a cornfield. There is something about an August cornfield – the colour of it, the sound of it in a light wind – that feels like the month distilled into a single image. If you know where one is, go.

And the birds. I am watching for the birds particularly this month as it seems like the birds go quiet in August. They are still around, looking bedraggled and exhausted after feeding their broods, and it feels like I need to make more of an effort to notice them. August birds / Birds of the Month

🌙 Looking Up

This is the one I’ve been looking forward to since I mentioned it last month. The Perseid meteor shower peaks in August – usually around the 11th to 13th – and it is the single best meteor shower of the year for those of us without telescopes or any particular astronomical expertise. Just darkness, a clear sky, and patience. August night sky / Looking Up

The Perseids can produce up to a hundred meteors an hour at peak. I will not see a hundred meteors an hour. I will see a handful, and each one will feel like a small gift. I recommend lying on your back on a blanket rather than standing – your neck will thank you – and giving your eyes at least twenty minutes to properly adjust to the dark before you start counting.

And after last month’s Buck Moon, I’m also looking forward to August’s full moon – the Sturgeon Moon. After the amber drama of July’s full moon, I want to be outside for this one deliberately, rather than catching it by accident over the rooftops. I’m planning to actually sit with it this time. Full moon dates and what to look for in August →

🍳 From the Seasonal Kitchen

August is the most abundant month in the seasonal kitchen, and I intend to make the most of it before everything tips into autumn, and I start reaching for the slow cooker again.

Tomatoes are the headline. Proper tomatoes, the ones that actually smell like tomatoes, still warm from wherever they’ve been sitting in the sun. I want to do as little to them as possible – good olive oil, salt, bread, maybe some torn basil. A Caprese situation. An everything-on-one-plate situation. The kind of eating that only works in August and feels like a small act of seasonal loyalty.

And the blackberries won’t be long now. The minute they’re ready I want to make something with them – a crumble, almost certainly, because there is always a crumble and I have no objection to this – and probably a small batch of blackberry jam, if I can face the heat of a kitchen in August. The jam might wait for September. The crumble will not. August baking / The Seasonal Oven

Something cold to drink as well – August drinks / Something to Sip – because August kitchens remain their own particular kind of hostile and I stand by everything I said about that last month.

✂️ Make Something

The pressed flowers from July are still waiting. This month I am actually doing something with them. I’ve committed to it here, publicly, so that I have to. A card. Possibly a small framed thing. Definitely not another pile in a book. August crafts / Make Something

I’m also drawn to something foraged this month – a late summer wreath using what’s in the hedgerows. Seed heads, rosehips just beginning to colour, dried grasses, maybe some of those sycamore wings. Something that looks like August smells. I’ve been meaning to try this for two years, and the materials are literally right there on the canal path, which is running out of excuses.

📓 Words & Wondering

Last month’s prompt – what does this summer actually feel like, as opposed to how I expected it to feel? – turned out to be more interesting than I anticipated. A heatwave, early blackberries, and the sense of a season turning before I was quite ready for it. Not exactly what I’d planned. More interesting, honestly.

August’s prompt from Words & Wondering is this: What do you want to carry with you from this summer, and what are you ready to put down?

Last Christmas I received a poetry book, ‘A Poem for Every Day of the Year’, edited by Allie Esiri. It’s a lovely book to dip into. I was looking through the poems for August, and this extract from ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’ by John Keats resonated.

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new mown mead;
That is the grasshopper’s – he takes the lead
In summer luxury. – he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter’s evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills,
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
TheGrasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

August is like a hinge to the year. The year is turning, slowly and imperceptibly – the helicopter seeds say so, the blackberries say so, the changing quality of the light says so – and there’s something about knowing that that makes it easier to be honest about what’s been working and what hasn’t. Not in a January-resolution way. Just quietly, in a notebook, on a warm evening before the light goes. August nature journalling / The Nature Journal

⚽ The Sporting Season

August means the football season returns, which, depending on your feelings about football, is either very good news or the sound of summer officially ending. For me it’s somewhere in between: I have affectionate feelings toward football without being particularly devoted to it, and there’s something about the return of the familiar rhythm of a Saturday match that feels, oddly, like a seasonal marker.

The cricket continues, unhurried and essential. August cricket feels like the purest version of the sport: long days, slow progress, the radio on in the background of everything. If you haven’t tried listening to cricket on the radio while doing something else entirely, I cannot recommend it highly enough as a form of very gentle company. Particularly effective during a heatwave, as it turns out.

🌱 Tend to Yourself

August wellness intention Tend to Yourself: I want to have at least one genuinely unscheduled day this month. Not a day where I’m catching up on things. Not a day where I’m being productively restful. A day with no plan, where I follow whatever the morning suggests and don’t apologise for it.

After July’s heatwave, I also want to be kinder to myself about my energy levels. Some months you do less. That’s not failure. That’s just being a person who lives in a body that responds to weather. I’m trying to remember this.

I also want to keep the morning-outside-before-phone habit going. It’s easier in summer, when going outside doesn’t require a philosophical commitment to the cold. I’m aware that September is coming and I’m not ready for this particular reason. But for now, the garden, the morning light, the birds, ten minutes before the day begins. Still worth it. Still my favourite small act of resistance.

And I want to notice the light changing. Not dramatically; it doesn’t happen dramatically in August. But it is happening, week by week, the evenings drawing in by minutes and then more minutes, the afternoon light landing at a different angle than it did in June. I find it beautiful, and I want to pay attention to it rather than resist it. The turn is already here, written in the hedgerows. We might as well look.

An Invitation

That’s my August. Perseids and tomatoes and the Sturgeon Moon and the blackberries on the canal path and finally doing something with those pressed flowers and one genuinely unscheduled day.

I’d love to know what August means to you. Is it still full summer, or, like me this year, can you already feel autumn arriving at the edges? Did you notice the early blackberries? The conkers forming? The sycamore seeds?

Leave a comment below – these letters are meant to be a conversation, not a broadcast, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Welcome to August.

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Tell us in the comments – what does August mean to you? Are the blackberries ripening where you are? What are you reading this month? And are you planning to watch the Perseids?