“Drawing Nigh, Summer’s End”
August breaks with torpid grace across the dunes of northern Michigan as Big Sable lighthouse lends distant perspective. Here, striated above Lake Michigan, morning light recedes into wisps of melancholic blue.
August, when asters bloom in random clusters and alders clump and shimmer almost unnoticed amid the undulating sweep of reed and marram, here live the grasses that color and cowl these dunes and texture the landscape. The change in hues, all but imperceptible by late August, subtly signal the end to summer is nigh.
Light breezes and shadows, discernibly longer by late afternoon, bring with them nostalgia, one’s yearning for fixity and a reluctance to accept the abiding change in seasons. An early provocation perhaps and reminder of summer’s mortality, the landscape resisting the slow, inexorable drift of dunes through time, reluctantly, implacably into the next season.
