Between Solstice and Equinox

This evening I worked a while in what still seems like acres of garden.  It's not so large really--just a standard city lot--but in summer, when walking beneath the grape arbor is like stepping into the shade of a venerable tree, it expands into a little realm with boundaries somewhere out beyond the reaches of my sight. 

I noticed tonight that the grapes have lost the vivid green of early summer and their skins have grown faintly translucent, a prelude to darkening into the inky, purple-blue of ripeness.  It won't be long until I'll be on ladders in the evenings.  I'll bring the Mason jars down from the attic, and the harvest into the house.

All across the garden, summer's finishing its work.  New squash and tomatoes are ready to pick each evening and cucumbers that were surely fingerlings yesterday are as big around as my wrist tonight.  But there are, too, other things less appealing: the first signs of powdery mildew on squash leaves, white leafhoppers investigating the grape canopy,  hoof-prints of night-feeding deer, deep in the loam.  In late summer, ruin lurks, always, on the edge of bounty. 

In another month, the afternoon sun will go syrupy, its rays golden and viscous, its warmth mellowing as the hours it lights the sky each day grow fewer. The lushness of the garden will dwindle down into drowsy autumn and the house will seem nearer to the alley hedge than it's been for months.  But not yet.  Tonight there are still little bats around the streetlight, and a tracery of moth-dust on the other side of my lighted
 window.  The old fountain spills water from tier to tier in the darkness under the arbor as it does each year, from last frost to first.  I'm glad it has a while longer left to run.