fabulous friday // august tradition

We're pretty big on traditions.

Christmas music comes the day after thanksgiving and not before. Beach Boys Sound of Summer is for Memorial day through Labor day. We always sleep outside (in a tent or under the stars,) at least once every summer, glow sticks included. We take all-night Hitchcock Marathons. We go to an (awesome) apple picking farm every fall. We go and cut down a Christmas tree and eat leftover thanksgiving turkey sandwiches on black friday. Tamale's are always in the freezer on New Years...

So, as you can imagine, we have a lot of fun. Birthdays, snow days, summer vacations, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Eve...We do it all big.

I mean, with eleven people in the family, it's hard to not do it big, isn't it?

Well, so this "August tradition" I have...

I have this book I love... Tuck Everlasting. It's a beautiful book. It's very short, but very sweet.

It takes place in somewhere rural ruralness and is a story about a young girl who stumbles upon a crazy story about living forever & what that brings (living forever and the story.) Sounds dumb? Well, you'd have to read it. Because it's really not.

But what I can say is this is (more or less hands down,) my favorite prologue:

   The first weeks of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first weeks of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after. 

   One day at that time, not so very long ago, three things happened and at first there appeared to be no connection between them.

   At dawn, Mae Tuck set out on her horse for the wood at the edge of the village of Treegap. She was going there, as she did once every ten years, to meet her two sons, Miles and Jesse. 

  At noontime, Winnie Foster, whose family owned the Treegap wood, lost her patience at last and decided to think about running away. 

  And at sunset a stranger appeared at the Fosters' gate. He was looking for someone, but he didn't say who. 

  No connection, you would agree. But things can come together in strange ways. The wood was at the center, the hub of the wheel. All wheels must have a hub. A Ferris wheel has one, as the sun is the hub of the wheeling calendar. Fixed points they are, and best left undisturbed, for without them, nothing holds together. But sometimes people find this out too late. 

It sets the scene for the whole story and, in the end, ties everything together.

So, in those first weeks of August, when we're "at the top of the Ferris wheel," I make a cup of tea and find a quiet spot to listen to Enya, and read Tuck Everlasting.

(because if you're going to read Tuck Everlasting, do yourself a favor and please listen to Enya's A Day Without Rain. Do it for the sake of the book. do it for the sake of the music. do it for me. do it for yourself... even, dare I sing say do it for love?)