A little list: July
A monthly, seasonal, curated list.
Dear Reader,
The cicadas had been droning since morning. In the grove, everything was still. The rabbit stood in the center. It wasn’t eating. It didn’t seem afraid. It stood there for a long time.
A Cooper’s hawk wove through the oaks in muted flight. The sky was pale blue and made of small pieces. The wineberries were ripe, a glossy red. I picked three and found a small white bone in a pool of light beneath them. It looked like it had been dropped, from high up, maybe from the beak of the young hawk. I put it in my pouch.
The wind rustled the leaves. The rabbit moved. Everything became horizontal. It was bright. The brightness didn’t mean anything.
In my pouch: three red berries, one white bone. That was midsummer.
After the busyness of spring on the farm, summer has brought back a cadence to my reading life that feels deeply satisfying. June offered a kind of small beginning inside all that expansiveness. Something cracked open a bit, and the books I found myself reaching for reflected that. They were reaching outward too. Hopeful, restless, still a little uncertain. Intellect, instinct, longing. These books helped shake me out of a lingering reader’s block and made way for what July seems to want.
July is more heated and messy, like the garden. There’s abundance now, and with it, an inevitable tangling. It’s a ripening month, and I’ve been drawn toward books that hold that feeling. Hot, slow, emotionally rich.
Here are the books, films, poems, and rabbit holes keeping me company this month:
