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Category: summer

Bittersweet

Bittersweet

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Labor Day is a bittersweet holiday. While other nations celebrate their workers on the first day of May, we do it on the first Monday of September.  So instead of welcoming the warm weather, we are saying goodbye to it (or good riddance, depending upon your point of view and tolerance level).

The fact is, if you love summer, as I do, you may not be a big fan of Labor Day. It always makes me think of the last jump in the pool when I was a kid, my parents saying, “OK. But this is absolutely the last one. We have to go home. You have school in the morning.”

School in the morning. A line guaranteed to chill the soul of any child, a phrase that still, decades later, makes my stomach do a little somersault.

As the years pass more quickly, though, and as each Labor Day (and Memorial Day, 4th of July and other holiday) leads more surely to the next fete in the lineup, I’ve come to see the first Monday in September as a bellwether in reverse. If summer is good, Labor Day is not so bad. If summer has been summer — hot, sticky, filled with enough swimming and biking and eating of ice cream bars — then I reluctantly, but without reservation, say farewell.

Last Day, First Day

Last Day, First Day

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Last day of school, first day of summer. The weight of the world would slip from my shoulders. Time stood still, and days were warm and without purpose. There would be cool shady mornings and long lighted evenings. There would be watermelon and iced tea and potato salad;  filmy cotton dresses and new Keds that I’d get dirty right away.

And later, when the children were young, there was their joy to witness, the shaving cream fights at the bus stop on the last day (see above), the creek wading and romps in the woods, the road trips to Kentucky and Indiana and Montana and Maine. Summer was a time to put the world aside. Now the world pushes its way into every season.

One daughter packs for Africa, another is about to be a senior in college, the youngest a senior in high school. Time didn’t stand still after all.

Eight or Later

Eight or Later

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I heard yesterday on the weather report that the sun will not set before eight p.m. from now until August 18. It’s a good way to celebrate May Day and the start of a new month, with the promise of light.

Hot autumn days with an unshakeable air of melancholy are proof that it’s not lack of warmth that makes me mourn the end of summer. It’s the early darkness.

Extra daylight means early mornings and late nights. It means tomatoes and zinnias and basil. It means after-dinner strolls,  evening swims and long suppers on the deck. And of course, it’s the perfect excuse for insomnia. Summer is often thought an indolent time, but when you consider the extra daylight it gives us, it’s better thought of as an active season, a heroic season.

Knowing we have three and a half months of late sunsets ahead of us gives me a sense of calm — even after solstice comes, we will still have light on our side.

Outside In

Outside In

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The heat is building. It will be 95 today. But the last three days have been a reprieve: cool nights and thinly warm days. No blanket of humidity. Just clean heat and when the sun goes down a hint of chill.

Which means we turned off the air-conditioning, opened the windows and kept the door to the deck ajar these last few days.

Summer is at its peak when this boundary is broken. Copper wanders at will from couch to yard, no scratching to be let in. We have the same freedom. Indoors or out, what does it matter? It is all one. What liberation. This is what summer was made for: to bring the outside in.

Night Swim at Still Pond

Night Swim at Still Pond

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It became a habit this summer, a welcome one. I’d leave home a little after 8, do some laps or aqua jog in the deep end if no one was diving. At 8:45 the guard blows the whistle; the last 15 minutes are adult swim. I sidestroke in the gloaming. While treading water, I look at the Franklin Farm windmill. I listen to the conversations around me, the mothers with babies on their hips, the fathers bonding, tossing balls with their kids. One guy with a bald spot on the back of his head does what seem like labored laps while his kid sprays him with a soaker gun every time he reaches one side or the other. I think the guy is slow, but when we swim next to each other I notice he’s just as fast as me — in other words, I’m just as slow as he.

Last night I went for what I thought might be the last swim of the season. Turns out the pool will be open the next two weekends, but I doubt I’ll make it. It will be a cooler, and one of the best parts about swimming this summer — the reason I’ve done so much of it, I think — is how hot it’s been. I don’t mind bathtub-warm water.

For these reasons and more, last night’s dip felt like a valedictory. It was much earlier in the evening, of course, since it’s dark by 8, and I left quickly so I could drive kids to the first high school football game of fall. The pool was almost empty at the end — except for a surprise birthday party about to happen. As I was pulling out of the parking lot in the twilight I heard behind me a burst of sound. “Surprise!” and then a bunch of whooping and clapping. It was for the birthday girl, I know, but I couldn’t help but think it was a round of applause for summer itself.

Midpoint

Midpoint

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Yesterday after a swim I looked at the sky, bright blue with dark clouds hovering, and I realized: Summer is half over. This is not a happy thought. So I pondered midpoints, the balance inherent in them, the way they help us see forward and back.

Because we vacationed in May this year, the summer seems lusciously long and uninterrupted. Seems precious, too. Use it all, I tell myself. From beginning to end. From early each morning till late each night.

Sound of Summer

Sound of Summer

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Of course there are cicadas — we call them summer bugs — whose steadily rising chorus means that summer has truly arrived. And there are crickets, the warm nights full of their singing. But on sultry mornings or evenings, nothing says summer like the sound of a pulsating sprinkler. Tick, tick, tick, tick, spraaaay. Tick, tick, tick, tick, spraaaay. Listen to it long enough and it begins to sound like another insect. It is the mechanical side of summer, proof that we are parched, in need of moisture, that we can, in some limited way, make our own rain.

76 Trombones

76 Trombones

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It’s how we’ve welcomed summer for at least a decade: Every year on the last day of school we make fudge and watch “The Music Man.” We started the tradition when the girls were in elementary school and there were shaving cream fights at the bus stop. We’ve toned down the clamor some, but “The Music Man” remains.

It’s a perfect summer film: 4th of July pageants, picnics in the park, barbershop quartets, one of my favorite movie lines: “I always think there’s a band, kid.” And of course, there’s the music.

Cool Shade

Cool Shade

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It’s chilly outside this morning, but one thing about the day makes me think about the sticky summer weather to come. It is shade, the deep green depths of it, the way it cools and soothes. I grew up in a shadeless subdivision, playing in meadows and along creek banks for hours each day under a full and merciless sun. The two trees in our front yard were saplings I was dying to climb. By the time they were large enough, we’d outgrown the house and moved away. Maybe it’s this early shade deprivation that explains my attraction for cool, dappled glades; for fern and hollow; for the quiet, naturally air-conditioned woods. Each spring we extol the return of flower and leaf. Shouldn’t we also celebrate the return of shade?