By the end of August, Gault Mills is dry. The road margins have gone to dust, and the dust gets on everything within twenty feet of the pavement. The river runs low and slow, down to the gravel. The lawns went brown back in July and nobody is fighting it, because everybody up here knows the brown is temporary and the water bill is not.
The evenings
The evenings are coming in earlier now. In June it stayed light past nine, and now the porch lights come on before the supper dishes are cleared. Nobody makes much of it in August. But everybody has started to notice, the first small turn of the whole year back toward the wet half.
School and the benches
School starts in the first week of September, and in a town this small the first day of school is a real event, because so much of the place runs through the one building. The shop class comes back to its benches. And before long the busiest stretch of the repair café's year comes back too, once the first cold night sends people digging out space heaters, half of which quit last winter and got put away broken. I am not going to oversell it. It is a small town and a small café. But it is a real season, and it comes around every year without fail.
Waiting on the rain
Mostly, at the end of August, the town is waiting. Everybody knows the rain is coming back. The whole region knows it, the same as it knows the tide will turn. There is nothing anxious in the waiting, only a long regional patience, the brown lawns and the low river both due to be rained on before very long.
The book is out now, which means the town can be visited on the page any time, in whatever weather I put it in. I wrote a good deal of it in months much wetter than this one. But the town is drier than I am at the end of August, standing in its dust and its low water, waiting on the same gray sky I am waiting on up here.