Midsummer beauty evident on the wing, the leaf, the sky

A great blue heron with crooked neck and slow-motion wingbeat cruised across the Unity park late this afternoon. Martins nesting in the bird condos by the baseball field darted around like point-winged aerobats and poked their gatherings into the holes where little heads were peering out. One thought I was standing too close to the kids and buzzed me three times, veering toward my head, before I got the message and into the car.

On the road home a goldfinch played chicken between me and an oncoming pickup. At home in the yard, a robin launched from under the sumac and flapped into the cedars. A squad of blue jays scolded something in the hemlocks.

I saw the first goldenrod of the summer on a trip to Calais. The meadowsweet, its conical arrays of blossoms beautiful in the afternoon heat. Dust-pink steeplebush. A lone orange poppy appeared in the weeds beside the driveway, and down the embankment is the last of the yearly spray of day lilies. White clover waist-high. A field of fireweed. Cattails. Tough little chamomile flowers growing in gravel, sweet-smelling when they’re cut. Purple nightshade creeping out from under the chokecherry bush.

A tangle of wild madder, with tiny white stars for flowers and green whorls for leaves, is crowding around a post of the porch. Queen Anne’s lace blossoms hover on their stalks like white moons suspended in space.

Hercules is overhead after dusk, a trapezoid of stars with four limbs shooting off the joints. In a clear sky and a pair of binoculars you can spot a hazy ball of light between two of the stars, it’s globular cluster M13. Southward, Altair burns over the fir tops in Aquila, the Eagle, and up and to the left is even brighter Vega, which will shift slowly northward as the millennia pass and eventually become the pole star. Meanwhile the seven bright stars of Ursa Major are up there circling around Polaris, the north star for now.

Trying to piece together how long flowers have graced the Earth (the first blossoms appeared about 140 million years ago), I found a strange statement by a university scientist: “People become so obsessed with flowers it is important to remember a flower is nothing more than a cluster of spore-bearing leaves surrounded by whorls of protective and often albeit attractive leaves.” The point apparently being: Don’t be fooled by fibers and chemicals, which are empty nothing; beauty is an illusion.

I can’t believe it. On the road home last week toward sunset, huge clouds had boiled up overhead in billows and shocks of startling definition, sharp gray, purple, blue and silver shadows layered on layers. I slowed down to look. In my lane another car had slowed, and one had pulled over. We all saw it. It was not an illusion. Those giant clouds were intimidating, awesome, gorgeous.

The beauty of midsummer is as real as a living being.