Quick question: How long can summer’s honey breath hold out against the wrackful siege of battering days?

Please don’t answer that. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to know. Not yet.

I want to hear birds singing the morning out of the night, bullfrogs bemoaning their loneliness, the silence down deep in a lake. I want to smell honeysuckle and sassafras. I want to lie in meadow grass and think about blue.

I don’t want to cringe at the sting of cold every time I step out the door. I don’t want to feel trepidation at every weather report. I don’t want to wonder if this year, yet again, the trees will manage to push pale new leaves from their stiff, bare limbs.

They did it again this year, but how? I’ve never heard a good explanation. I’ve heard about meristems and axils, the phloem, parenchyma and xylem, the hypha and mycorrhiza. If I keep asking, “Yeah, but why?”, the explanation eventually comes down to “the trees just know…”

I think it’s nice that trees know. They know what to do and when to do it without being remanded to their rooms for misbehavior or sent to college as soon as they’re old enough to bear fruit. Even an acorn knows what to do.

I just like the notion of trees knowing. It’s astonishing that for all our post-modern sophistication, we still refer to things knowing. Stock markets know. Computers know. Cars know. Mother Earth knows. Dumb luck knows. My heart knows.

(I’m not so sure about my computer. I think it only thinks it knows, but for all I know, it’s just playing dumb. Why isn’t there an un-dumb button?)

God only knows how a butterfly knows when it’s time to fly to Mexico. How does distant snow know when I’ve put away my snow shovel? How did it know that this year I waited until the Fourth of July?

And then there’s “they.” I don’t even know who “they” is, but I know they know. They know where I live. They know how old I am. They know how old my refrigerator is, and they have my credit card number. I fear the day will come when they will just up and send me a new fridge because they figure I’m too dumb to know I need an upgrade.

The day will come when UPS delivers me a coffin I never ordered. I’m going to open the box and think, “I knew it…”

But I don’t think they know how long summer’s honey breath can hold out. I don’t think they even care. I bet they’re already planning Columbus Day sales and warming up the Christmas jingles.

I’m not waiting for winter or that grim UPS truck. While it’s still warm in the evening, I’m taking my canoe across the lake and up the stream on the other side to beach on a rock below the rapids. As the last of the sun dies in the west. I’m going to listen to the birds chatter their good-nights in the twilight, then the frogs cranking up their mournful chorus from the mud.

And then the lone thrush, the last to sleep. Deep in the pillared dark, its lonely tootle flows, almost like a call to come in to the dark and the woes.

I’ll take the heat. It’s fine with me. I prefer a fan over A/C, a breeze over a chill. Easy for me to say, of course, because I’m too smart to wear a suit and tie in the summer. I don’t earn squat for income, but I’m successful enough that I can work with my shirt off.

My theory: It’s good to be hot in the summer. When autumn flares and yellow leaves shake against the cold, it’s a relief. It feels good to snuggle into a sweater and take a breath of cold air. And when you look out the window and see that first snow carefully everywhere descending, it’s beautiful. It’s peaceful. It’s good.

Glenn Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.