What my mother used to say

"Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it." — Proverbs 15:17

My mother used to say that August is not a month for starting things.

She said it the way she said most things, which was plainly, while doing something else with her hands. I think she was shelling butter beans the first time I heard it, but I cannot be sure. I heard her say it enough times over enough Augusts that the original moment has blurred.

What she meant, I think, is that August is the month when you live off what you have already planted. The garden is in. The tomatoes are coming whether you planned for them or not. August is not the month you begin a new project or rearrange the living room or sign up for something you saw in a magazine. August is the month you stand at the stove and deal with what is already in front of you.

I did not understand this when I was young. I was the kind of girl who wanted to start things in every month. But I am seventy-seven now and I have lived through enough Augusts to know she was right. There is a wisdom in not beginning. In letting the season do what it was already doing before you got involved. In sitting down on the porch after supper and not making a list.

August has its own pace. It is slower than July, which is strange because the heat is the same, but the days have started pulling back just enough that you can feel the year leaning toward fall even though fall is still weeks away. My mother felt this. She did not call it anything. She just stopped starting things in August and let August come to her.

I am in my kitchen this morning and the counter has tomatoes on it and the jars are in the pantry waiting and there is nothing I need to begin. Everything I need to do today I have already started. The rest is finishing, and finishing is its own kind of work, and it is good work, and my mother knew this before I did.

She was a woman who understood what a month was for. January was for planning. March was for putting seeds in the ground. August was for standing at the stove and receiving what the ground had given. She did not push August. She let August push her, and she called it rest, and she was right about that too.

Lord, teach me to finish what is already begun.