I forced myself to stop lamenting about missing this or that about a month ago, choosing instead to fully enjoy the remainder of my time in, arguably, the most beautiful place on Earth (Lake Tahoe).  Then, I knelt down to cut open some seeds. Somehow, when I stood up, August was just about over.

As I swam this past weekend, staring at the light dancing in the water, I couldn’t help but get a bit wistful at how fast its all changing. The chill from the water lingers for a bit longer after drying off now. The aspens are starting to show tinges of yellow, heavier layers have replaced t-shirts on my morning bike ride to work, and believe it or not, I got stuck in a snowstorm on my hike last weekend. For me, there’s always a bit of melancholy that comes along with the waning days of summer. In addition to summer being my favorite season, my heart breaks thinking about my favorite off-work activity (reading on the beach until I get hot, jumping in the lake, drying off, repeat) slipping through my fingers. At the same time, watching the seasons change in an entirely new way is so captivating. Another, admittedly much sillier, upside to this season of my life is that this is the first fall I will be “harvesting” anything, which really makes all the seasonal festivities make much more sense.

With autumn now looming over us, Gerardo and I have been very busy, driving around all around the basin in search populations ideal for seed collection. We have shifted into spending all our time scouting in preparation for September, when the whole Forest Service botany crew will begin seed collecting. Suddenly, everything seems to be in seed. Populations we’ve been monitoring all summer are now in fruit, which has been so exciting to watch. Finding more populations after scouting all summer has become challenging, but this makes each new location on our map a bit more rewarding.

We got our first taste of seed collecting last week at Spooner Lake; a new parking lot has been approved for construction in a patch of forest, meaning all plant populations (and their seed bank) will be lost from that immediate area. Because of these unique circumstances, we were able to collect all of the seeds from some of our target species rather than the standard 10% or 20%, saving them from an asphalt-covered doom.  We have yet to clean the seeds, but we estimate that we collected roughly 15,000 seeds! I listened to a great audiobook and spent ~10 hours in a forest plucking seeds off plants. I cannot fathom a better workday.

As the end of summer creeps closer, I find myself more at peace with the change than in past years. While the incoming colder weather may spell the end of my dearly-beloved beach days, it also marks the beginning of the most rewarding part of my internship yet, seed collection! Most of all, I’m looking forward to the idiom, “you reap what you sow,” applying to my life in a somewhat literal sense.