The scene is a creekside shed on a hot August day. Whenever work stalls—nails run short, or the sun gets too fierce—the builders lean against the fresh framing, drink solar tea, and watch the neighbors’ horses drift across the pasture and up the camas swale. The horses are curious but never quite trust the people watching them. The speaker catches their wary black eyes, cocked heads, and stamping hooves, as if the animals sense something predatory or measuring in human faces. Any small motion—a lifted chisel, a sloshing water bottle—sends them bolting uphill. The people watch them go with real fondness, yet also with longing for the neighbors’ land and animals. The closing line is wryly honest: country folk in August always seem to want what lies just beyond their own fence. The mood is lazy, warm, and wistful, with a gentle self-mockery underneath.
Of Country Folk in August — Summary
Whenever we worked at the creekside shed there was always something else to do such times as we were stumped, or nails ran short, or the sun reached round the fir and baked us down from raftering, roofing, or the like. We leaned, gossip-like, against the fresh framing of the walls, sipping solar tea, watching the edge of a cloud's long skirt chase the neighbors' horses leisurely across their pasture, down the camas swale and up the other side, against the black contrast of maple-shrouded hills. The horses liked to amble up to our corner, stand and watch.
We couldn't cure them of the shies, though we might try with handfuls of our green grass, or a few choice coaxing words. They'd check us out: first one black blink from behind the forehead blaze, and then another, cocking their long heads round to see our self-assured, predatory faces, eyes front, gazing on them, horse-flesh accountants by their reckoning. Their flanks would shiver, and their forefeet stamp, scoring the earth in a language built of weight.
Some movement would always spook them off: a silvery chisel hefted, or water bottle sloshed, spattering sun. They'd hammer up the swale; Lovingly we'd watch them go, coveting our neighbors’ lands and all that lived thereon, as country folk in August always do.