By Gary Sprengel

I’m madly in love with it, even if it doesn’t always return my advances. I speak of August. Our eighth month. Leos and Virgos. When Nixon resigned, Elvis died, and Madonna was born.

Sultry. Sleepy. Still.

Deep summer, but perhaps the slightest hint of autumn in the air, too. You’re finally settling into New Jersey’s warm weather rhythms just before it’s all yanked away. Lazy but full of promise and last chances. The time to recharge and write a book. Retreat into solitude or endlessly dine al fresco with friends. The glorious lack of commitments and obligations. A world of potential before the madness of the last third of the year sets in. An immensely appealing blank slate of a month. I totally recognized August’s charms before Taylor Swift wrote a song about it.

I had affection for August even as a kid, but my admiration really took off once I graduated college. “Oh, August doesn’t need to be filled with the dread of school coming? Splendid!” I could sing the praises of less crowds and no beach fees in September, too, but this is August’s turn in the sun. I started calling it my month when I was twenty-three and sharing a beach house with college friends in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island. Kind of a nod to “The Summer of George” on Seinfeld. Labor Day was when that lease ran out; it was time to race through my to-do list!

There’s a melancholy about August that appeals to the Irish in me. Thirty-one fleeting days. Earlier sunsets. Later sunrises. The sunlight starts to hit differently. The first brown leaves begin falling from the trees. The season of death looms. There is a beauty in all of that, though. Summer is the only month so defined by start and end dates; no one ever asks how your winter or spring is going. The cities empty in August, especially on weekends; you can have them all to yourself. My mother’s fondness for an August vacation rubbed off on me. It gives you something to look forward to; I never understood people who regularly vacationed in June, especially at the Jersey Shore. The ocean is warmest in August, too, though you do run the risk of hurricanes, but that’s another plus for a weather freak like me.

August is clearly the best month of the summer. June is chaos and the weather getting its act together. July is stifling and devoid of any real character. August saves the best for last. The dog days. The full Sturgeon Moon. The Perseid meteor shower. The gin and tonics. The break from routine. The silence. Sunflowers. Those mellifluous crickets chirping their nightly song. Promise and regret rolled into one.

No other month comes close.

Gary Sprengel is a Harrison native who fled to Amish Country, PA to obtain his BA in communications from Elizabethtown College. He enjoys photography, craft beer, wandering urban landscapes, and country music. He wrote dating blogs under a pseudonym for about a year, and was once pulled onstage by Don Rickles in Atlantic City. He goes by the cryptic @garysprengel on Instagram and Twitter.