“In August, I feel acutely how lucky I am to belong to a species for whom yearning has no season. For the gulf fritillaries in my pollinator garden, the sense of everlasting summer is only an illusion — the passion vine will die back with the first frost. For us, passion is considerably more complicated than that, but the desire for it is not.

“Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life,” wrote The New Yorker’s Roger Angell in 2014, “but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love.” He was 93 when he wrote those words.

I need, I need, we say with the fledgling red-tail hawks, with the butterflies, with the cicadas in the echoing trees. I need, I need, I need. For us, there will never be an equinox. Until the end of our days, there will never be an equinox. It will always be full, glorious, everlasting summer.”