September Reverie

When October arrived last week and summer temperatures soared back into the 90s, I refused to turn my calendar ahead. It was a 1997 calendar of American Impressionist paintings that I had resurrected because I love revisiting the art each month and care not what year the calendar first appeared.  And because the September calendar’s illustration was “Lotus Lilies” painted in 1888 by Charles Courtney Curran, I simply wasn’t ready to let it go. 

Two women dressed in elegant hats and dresses from the late 1800s are being rowed in a boat across a pond filled with lotus blossoms.  Shieled by an enormous green umbrella backlit with incandescent light, they move slowly through the liquid field of fully opened lotus blossoms, gathering them as they go.

Reminded of a distant memory, I enter the boat with them and I’m immersed in the silence of the moment and the coolness of the water.  I am not yet ready for October’s fiery orange riot of heat. It will come soon enough. Until then, I will hang on to this 19th century September reverie when lotus blossoms and cool water were captured forever in a painting by Impressionist artist Charles Courtney Curran.  

I had been there before, rowing across a cool pond, but that is a story for another time.