There’s a moment in a Mississippi August evening when the sun lets go of the day and everything turns golden. The heat doesn’t leave, exactly—it just stretches out and settles in like your Aunt Shirley on the porch swing after supper. Crickets start their tuning, cicadas take over the rhythm section, and somewhere in the distance, someone’s radio hums out a country song that knows something about heartache and humidity.
Out here, time moves differently.
When I think of August, I think of porches—wide, wooden, weathered—and of people who sit on them with a glass of tea that’s more sugar than water. I think of lightning bugs, dancing like tiny lanterns above dewy grass, blinking in and out like they’re trying to write a love letter in Morse code. The porch is a sanctuary, a place where time slows down and the world feels just right.
We don’t chase them like we used to. But Lord, we remember it.
Bare feet on warm concrete. The clink of a mason jar lid being pried off. The hiss of the bug zapper (because let’s be honest, this is Mississippi—we keep the pretty bugs and fight the mean ones). Grandparents waving palm fans with the name of a funeral home printed across the back. That’s summer, right there. Life and death and laughter, all held together by a screened-in porch and a memory that smells faintly of citronella. It’s a shared experience, a communal rhythm that we all dance to.
By August, the gardens are complete and the air is thick enough to chew. Tomatoes ripen on windowsills. Fig trees sag with the weight of their own sweetness. And in this in-between time—after dinner but before bedtime—we step outside. Not to go anywhere, but just to be. To rock in chairs, to swap stories, to say things like “Sure is muggy” and “You remember the summer of ’89 when the power went out for a week?”
We remember, all right.
Because August in Mississippi has a way of pressing itself into you. Not just in sweat on your brow, but in your bones—in the way you crave stillness, and how you learn to read the wind just like your Grandpa used to. You feel the hush between the lightning and the thunder. You smell the rain before it comes. And you never, ever mistake the sound of your Mama calling you in from the yard for anything but what it is: final.
The lightning bugs start to fade around bedtime. Porch lights flicker on, one by one, like candles at a vigil for the day that’s ending. There’s something sacred about it. Something soft and slow that reminds you: even when the world feels too fast, there’s a place where the rhythm still makes sense. Where stories linger in the air longer than the smoke from the citronella coil, and where the night, for all its darkness, glows.
That’s Mississippi. That’s August. And for a little while, if you’re quiet and barefoot and willing, you can still catch a bit of magic in a jar.
