Instead of birdsong in the morning I'm listening to a multi-layered insect chorus on this last night of August. The month's first week was a miserable July re-mix and its end has had more than a taste of September. Classic late summer warm days and cool nights got squeezed into the middle, and I missed part of that here during a second trip to PEI, my first in full (but fading) season.

We avoided the largest crowds with afternoon drives through potato and hay fields (which had been bright canola yellow in June) to (free of charge) Provincial Park beaches, giving us a taste of the NE summer trips we couldn't fit in this year (because contractors and other stresses). I got my rural agriculture fix on PEI instead of in western Mass, and my ocean swimming in the Northumberland Strait and Gulf of St. Lawrence instead of Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic. Did not bring home any tomatoes (my garden has been bountiful), corn (local farm stands have provided), or new potatoes (not allowed across the border), but the late-season NS strawberries we bought in a NB supermarket were fantastic (and legal). And then we got home to amazing local peaches, which felt like skipping all of July's unpleasantness.

I would have liked another week or two of how I remember August (which did not use to feature wildfire smoke-hazed skies) but I gather that's so last century. Drone, chirp, and buzz on you hexapods; too soon you will go silent, too soon I'll be shutting the windows because of cold, not heat and humidity.