The big push is over. Summer is gone and we are walking, living and breathing in the remnants of that feverish, desperate spurt of growing, growing, growing. Plants are funny, funny strange and funny haha. You may know this all ready, but a blossom is a plants surge toward immortality.

A plant blooms for the sole purpose of creating seeds. And seeds, of course, are the insurance that next year the species will have yet another shot for survival. You have to be careful if you have plants that you want to bloom. If they’re too happy, well watered, well fertilized and fed, they just hang around and produce foliage. But when they’re stressed, when they perceive a threat to their lives they create a flower so the flower can create seeds and the seeds, well you know what seeds do.

When I look out my windows or take a walk these days I feel it. I feel that lack of urgency that the plants of summer possess. There’s a non-anxious spirit in the air that seems to say, we’ve done all the growing and reproducing and blooming we can do, we’ll just have to trust that we’ll be back next year in one form or another. Now let’s just relax, enjoy the breeze and wait to either die or go dormant.

Watching it all makes me sad in some ways, but in some ways I’m relieved for all concerned. You can’t just stay in the madness of growing forever, you need a rest, or is it dormant, you need to be dormant?

I just pulled out of my driveway a few minutes ago. I noticed the 4 o'clock, this yellow flower was completely closed. Later today they'll pop out and bloom and send a rare, sweet fragrance out into the air. They bloom late in the summer and make up for lost or limited time.

I love these halcyon days; cool mornings, warm afternoons, blue skies and constant little hints of the glory of autumn that is ahead.