August Doing What August Does

August ninth. There is a specific kind of fatigue that belongs only to mid-August, not the dramatic collapse of late July, not the restless anticipation of September, just this flat, slightly airless week in the middle where the summer has run out of new ideas and is just holding the temperature. The humidity broke for about forty minutes on Tuesday and I stood outside with my coffee like I'd been given a gift.

I've been keeping a rough list in my head of things that have quietly become true without my noticing the exact moment they became true. The open-studio Thursday evenings are on that list now, I went again last week, third time, and at some point between parking my bag and centering the clay I realized I wasn't deciding whether to come anymore, I was just coming. Simone and I don't make a plan; we end up there the way you end up at a place you go. The wheel is still difficult in a way that the class wasn't, no instructor circling, no built-in rhythm to the evening, but I've started to understand that the difficulty is also the point, which sounds like something a wellness podcast would say and I'm sorry for that but it's true.

post-wheel debrief. mandatory.

The windowsill has been very still this month. Both photographs, the collapsed bowl, the little letterpress card, all of it exactly where it was in June, which is how a windowsill is supposed to be. I keep walking past it without stopping. That feels right. The sketchbook is on the kitchen table because I moved it three days ago and haven't moved it back, which is the closest I've come to opening it in weeks. August is allowed to be quiet. I'm not going to argue with it.