There’s something about the quality of light on these big, soaring, late summer afternoons: pale-blue sky, vast tors and chimneys of white cloud making their silent way through the upper airs, ice-cream trucks jangling in the distance. You just get to feeling so down and lonesome.

This summer hasn’t quite been a bust, but it wasn’t exactly all I’d hoped, either. I did not complete the Great American Novel, or even make much of a start; I did not become appreciably fitter, richer, or better-smelling; I did not get around to domestic maintenance tasks that I will not list explicitly in case my wife reads this one. On the other hand, I’m still basically employed and sound of limb and mind, so it’s not all bad. It has been a cracking summer for the news business, which has kept me off the streets and short of time for melancholy reflection until now; the Washington government is taking a brief space to breathe, trading its traditional business activities of spending on credit and bombing things for its traditional leisure activities of dodging constituents and asking for money. This has left us newsmen stranded in the doldrums, but never you worry: We’ll find enough folly and human misery to patch together some entertainments for you until the heavyweights of those disciplines are back in town.

Others have also had big summers—very big. My squash plants, for example. They’ve taken over. There is no other way to describe it. I am no longer the master of my own lawn; like the French police, in certain neighborhoods I am simply no longer in control. These plants are the offspring of last year’s Thanksgiving decorations, whose tough seeds evidently didn’t cook hot enough in the compost pile. I admire toughness—like most Americans, I’m a bit of a Nietzschean under the surface—and I thought anyway that it would be amusing to have a few colorful, knobby fruits of our own rearing to ornament the groaning board come fall. It has all gotten rather away from me. Despite the urgent midseason construction of four high trellises, the vines have continued their expansion into the yard. Thanks to these, my grill is inaccessible on three of four sides now; I no longer can tell whether it is indulgence or fear that keeps me from cutting them back. In any case, if you want one of those weird green-and-yellow gourds that look vaguely like hand grenades, get in touch.

I am embattled on a number of fronts, not just in the yard. Our cleaning ladies have started breaking things—an ornamental lamp, a ceiling fan. The minivan, which I am vainly trying to get my family to call by the name Ağa Fil in a complicated and not very funny riff on its size, color, and license plate number, very cleverly picked up an industrial staple in one of its tire sidewalls. My assistant editor has abandoned me to spend a week at a conference in “Europe.” Much is in disarray and bad decline.

But the liquor store has started stocking grappa, which is an improvement. I don’t know what to make of this step towards cosmopolitanism in my rural county seat, but I won’t complain. The oldest child has started reading, shakily but truly; with her ability to sound out words of as many as six letters, she will soon be as capable as many of my writers and most of the young people who ask me for jobs. The youngest child has started to use the toilet. The middle child, I am afraid, has mostly just found new ways to antagonize her sisters. (I do not generally give out parenting advice, but this is a very useful word to teach small children—the oldest will sometimes complain, “Aurelia is ’tagonizing me.” So she is.)

So it’s a mixture, as is usual on this mortal coil, I suppose. August the First is one of those dates in history where quite a lot happens for some reason: On this day, Octavian defeated Marc Antony, the Ottomans captured Famagusta, Herman Melville was born. As you sit on the porch in the late-summer heat, still torpid but already a touch cooler than it has been, as you watch the clouds and sip grappa, you wonder how or why anyone could get up to anything in this sad season. History’s great men probably didn’t have squash plants taking over their yards, for one thing.