People look at the calendar and moan, “Summer is over,” but they’re only half correct.
Summer break is over for students in schools, colleges and universities, but we still have three weeks before the autumn equinox and the official end of summer. I still see short sleeves and Springsteen’s “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” everywhere I look.
I live in a land of four seasons, almost exactly between the North Pole and the equator, a few miles south of the 45th parallel. Every year I greet spring, summer, fall and winter with declining levels of enthusiasm, and I face the end of each season with growing amounts of melancholy. This will be my 72nd autumn, and some might say I am in the autumn of my life.
But I don’t think our life seasons necessarily correspond with nature’s more predictable seasons. My darkest life season was in the early summer a year ago, when I lost my partner and eventual wife of a quarter-century. We wed on a cold January day and entered the warmest season of our time together.
We have seasons of hope and despair, triumph and disappointment, sometimes at the same time as summer and winter and sometimes incongruously.
Summer — the dog — often rests with her snout on my foot. I think it comforts her to have that contact — or is she telling me, “I’m bored, are you sure you just want to sit here? Maybe we could go out and play together.”
August left us with a beautiful, breezy, sunny day, and I probably should have been doing something more active than sitting and writing. I did mow the lawn and did laundry and dishes, but I could have and should have done more outside. And yet it did not seem like a day for coulda-woulda-shoulda either, so I kept writing for a little longer. Regrets can be a waste of energy.
After all, summer is not over. It’s still only the First of September.
