Last week half the county was out in a lawn chair at three in the morning. This week the meteors have quit, more or less, and everybody's gone back to bed.

Their loss.

The sky doesn't need a show to be worth the walk out to the yard. Look west right after the sun goes down. That hard white light burning through the last of the daylight — that's Venus, and right now she's about as good as she gets. Farthest out from the sun she'll swing this whole go-round, and brighter than anything else up there by a mile. You won't mistake her for a star. Stars flicker. Venus just sits there and burns.

Watch the moon this week if you want a slow show. On the 16th it's a thin curl hung right between Venus and the star Spica. Every night after, it fattens up a little and climbs a little higher, till by the 19th it's half a moon. Then on the 20th and 21st it slides up next to Antares — that low red star down south, the heart of the Scorpion. Red star, half a moon, side by side. Worth stepping out for.

The best part costs nothing and nobody mentions it. With the moon still small and setting early, the Milky Way is up there every clear night this week, arched straight over your head. That smear of pale light running across the sky, thick and bright down toward the Scorpion — that's the whole rest of the galaxy, seen edge-on from your own back porch. It was up there last week too. The meteors just gave everybody a reason to tilt their head back and notice it.

You don't need the reason. Go look.

Roll the window down after dark this week and listen.

Katydids. Thousands of them, sawing away up in the treetops — katy-did, katy-didn't, katy-did — the loudest the woods get all year. They're at full roar now. Which means, if you put any stock in the old folks, the clock's running.

The saying goes six weeks from the first katydid to the first frost. Some say ninety days. My grandmother swore the day you heard one holler in July, it'd frost that same day in September. Nobody agrees on the count, which tells you about what it's worth. But start ticking from the first one you heard back in the summer and you land somewhere around the middle of October — which happens to be about when the mountains do wake up to their first white morning. So the bug's not always wrong.

While you're out there, quit picking the blackberries. The good ones are done. The old people said once the devil's passed over them you leave them be, and there's sense in it — the late ones this time of year go soft and wormy and sour, and you don't want them anyhow. Call it the devil, call it a fungus. Same berry either way.

The light's changed too, if you've paid attention. Comes in sideways of an evening now, gold instead of white. A stray poplar leaf here and there already gone yellow and turned loose. Summer's not done. But it's started looking back over its shoulder.