Book of Days

Grassy Waters Preserve is a natural wetlands ecosystem not far from where we live. It serves as the freshwater supply for West Palm Beach, but it also serves as a place where one can experience Florida’s great big sky, a place where the big sky is reflected in water below. Seth was out there for work one day recently; while he was there, he took the photograph that is the cover star for your Convivio Book of Days Calendar for September. The calendar is our monthly gift to you, a good companion to this blog, one that you can print on standard US letter size paper and pin to your bulletin board or stick on the refrigerator door, reminding you of the ceremony of a day.

This is what our sky often looks like this time of year, and for those who say we have no seasons I would counter with the notion that this is a September sky, a hold out from our summer skies, and it looks nothing like our winter skies. Summer holds on for a while longer here than in other places. Our seasonal shifts are subtle.

It is, nonetheless, a month of seasonal shifting: Autumn arrives by the almanac, this year on the 22nd. There are days that are weather markers: Matthew’s Day, bright and clear / Brings good wine in the next year is the general thought on St. Matthew’s Day, just before that day of equinox. It is a month of balance: day and night will be pretty much equal come that third week, but the balance is ephemeral; the planet keeps shifting in its seat and we enter the darker time of year here in the Northern Hemisphere. Even that sky will shift: Come October, we’ll see a lot fewer days that look like that.

Shifting planets and skies you can view by looking down as much as you can by looking up? Wonderful stuff. I wish you a month of wonder, too.

Our gift to you each month is a printable calendar to accompany this blog; here now is your Convivio Book of Days Calendar for August. And lest you think a good deal of planning goes into these calendars, this month’s calendar will dispel any suggestion of that: the photos for the calendar were taken just last week while we were vacationing in Maine.

We miss Maine but we are back to our regular routines. The sun is strong and the humidity is high and we keep hoping it will rain but it doesn’t. My garden survived my absence, though the okra got woody and the sunflowers are looking bedraggled. It is that time of summer where a bit of delirium begins setting in. It was nice to have a break of cooler New England weather, but we realize now a bit of a tactical error: there is still so much of a Florida summer yet to be endured.

Be that as it may, Lammas, today, reminds us that summer is indeed waning. Even here in this land where summer is king. It is, as well, the month of Obon, the traditional Japanese festival honoring the dead, and it is the month of the Assumption, which gave my grandmother Assunta her name. It is the month of cakes 21 feet tall and of St. Augustine, patron saint of brewers, and of St. Bartholomew, patron saint of bookbinders and book artists, whose day brings the traditional Printers’ Wayzgoose. And we begin to realize that autumn is on its way.

Somehow today we find ourselves halfway through the year. It is July now, and so here is your Convivio Book of Days Calendar for July. It’s a printable PDF on standard US Letter size paper, and it is a good companion to the blog. This month’s cover stars are strips of handmade paper tied in the bamboo in our back yard and left to flutter in the wind and weather. Upon each strip of paper is a wish. It’s a lovely custom surrounding Tanabata, the star festival of Japan that falls each year on the Seventh day of the Seventh month.

This month brings as well the conclusion of Ramadan with Eid Ul-Fitr. There are a few national holidays: Today, the First, is Canada Day, and of course our own Independence Day on the Fourth, and on the Fourteenth, Bastille Day in France. July ushers in the Dog Days of summer, traditionally the hottest part of the year, ruled by the dog star Sirius, and it brings a number of saints’ days––St. Anne and St. James, St. Martha and St. Swithins. And come the end of the month, it is Lammas Eve: It is the day Shakespeare chose as the birthday of Juliet. The eve ushers in August and Lammas, which is our first marker of summer’s passing into fall.

But that’s a long time from now. Now we welcome July.