Change in the air

Hot and humid but no rain.

It feels in the last few days as if the seasons are shifting.

Not so much the weather but the activity: wood trucks on the road; tractors pulling loads of winter firewood; a first chain saw cutting away in the forest and occasional rifle shots reverberating at dusk or dawn as a regulated cull of deer and boar begins.

I too have been shifting firewood I felled last winter up towards the house: field maple, walnut, hazel and downy oak - all crisp and dry, home to beetles, mice and many ants.

And when the machines stop the August silence floods back in on the hot and scarcely moving air, Gianni’s dogs impatient to be out as distant autumn promises her cooling and mosquito-free nights.