Rhonda Gates Paintings

July 2026

July Has a Soundtrack

It’s easy to think of July as one long stretch of hot afternoons, green trees, and late sunsets.

The longer I paid attention, the less constant July became. It changed every day, just not fast enough to notice.

I've been preparing for an artist talk at the Rockford Art Museum about my painting Twilight's Indigo Breath. I assumed I'd spend that time thinking about paint, composition, and process. Instead, I found myself thinking about July. Not one particular evening, but the rhythm my days had settled into over the past several summers: mornings in the garden and evenings that somehow always ended outside.

A few years ago, I planted milkweed for monarch butterflies. Every summer since, those plants have become part of my daily routine. Morning and evening, I head outside with a pair of scissors to gather fresh leaves for the caterpillars I'm raising indoors after finding their eggs. While I'm cutting milkweed, I turn over every leaf I can reach. Some mornings I don't find a single egg. Other mornings I find several, each one no larger than the head of a pin

Back inside, I rinse the leaves, dry them, scrape away the dried latex from the cut stems, and place them into water tubes. Then I replace yesterday's leaves, clean away the frass, and make sure every caterpillar is healthy before heading to the studio.

I won't pretend it's my favorite part of the day. By late summer, I'm more than ready to stop rinsing leaves and cleaning containers. But once I've brought those tiny eggs inside, I feel responsible for them. Left outdoors, most would never survive the predators waiting for them, and with so much monarch habitat gone, every butterfly that eventually returns to the garden feels like a small victory.

Most mornings, the caterpillars don't appear much different from the day before. They're simply a little larger. But then, eventually, one by one, they crawl up to the top of the enclosure and hang in the shape of a "J." The next time I look, they've become chrysalises. A week or two later, monarch butterflies emerge, and I carry them back to the garden.

Living through that process, the transformation rarely feels dramatic. Most of the change happens between one ordinary day and the next.

I couldn't tell you when I started stepping outside at nearly the same time every evening. It simply became part of my day.

I kept telling myself I was going outside to watch the sunset. Looking back, I think the sunset was simply what got me there. It was everything afterward that kept me outside.

The cicadas seem to take over July. Their drone is so constant during the day that it almost disappears into the background. Some are nearby. Others answer from farther away, their calls rising and falling in waves across the neighborhood.

As the sun begins to set, the songbirds settle in for the night while the cicadas gradually begin to quiet. I've found myself listening for the first katydid because I know the evening is about to change. When it finally breaks through, another soon answers from somewhere farther away, their voices briefly weaving together with the fading drone of the cicadas.

As darkness settles in, the crickets begin to chirp, gradually filling the spaces between the katydids. Before long, the cicadas have fallen silent. Later, even the katydids stop, leaving the crickets to carry the night a little longer. As the last light disappears, fireflies drift through the yard, stitching brief constellations into the grass.

The landscape rarely announces its changes.

It accumulates them.

The light was changing, too.

At first, I noticed the obvious things. Sunset was arriving a little earlier, and the shadows were growing longer. But after enough evenings outside, I found myself paying attention to the interval just before civil twilight.

Before they cool, the colors intensify. The warm light becomes almost incandescent before it slowly begins to recede, holding the last remnants of sunlight for a few fleeting minutes.

That's the moment I found myself waiting for.

It never lasts long, and I can never say exactly when it ends, only that eventually the radiance gives way to rose, then violet, and finally indigo.

As the indigo deepens, it spreads from the sky to envelop everything beneath it. The clouds, the trees, even the spaces between them gradually belong to the same atmosphere. Around that same time, the first stars appear, and over the course of the summer I watch the familiar constellations slowly migrate toward the coming season's positions.

By then, it's difficult to point to the moment anything changed. The shift isn't dramatic. It isn't announced. It happens gradually enough that one evening feels almost identical to the last, until suddenly the season has moved on and the sky has become something different.

Looking back, Twilight's Indigo Breath didn't begin with one memorable evening. It grew out of returning to the same hour of the day, summer after summer.

Twilight's Indigo Breath