Farewell to Summer

It's strange about summer: unless you're a teacher (and maybe not even then), summer kind of loses its romantic allure once you're out of school. I work all summer long, and have since I entered the workforce after college -- scratch that, in fact, since I had to hold jobs during the summer while I was in college. And given that my high school summers were usually full of marching band and jazz band gigs, I haven't really felt that old, romanticized feeling of summer for quite a few years -- twenty years, even. Wow. Is that a sign of encroaching middle age? When it becomes meaningful to say that you haven't done X in twenty years?

Anyway, today is Labor Day, which is pretty much the "unofficial" end of summer. Summer's just another season, to me -- a time of year when the stuff I do to fill the time I'm not doing the normal stuff like working and washing clothes and cooking and such is markedly different from the stuff I do to fill the downtime in winter and other times. I definitely tend to read less during the summertime, and my thought processes become lazier. Well, maybe "lazier" isn't the right word, but "more scattershot". I'm more like to jump from one train of thought to another during summertime, looking for the goofy connections and whatnot between one thing and another. My fiction writing has always suffered in summertime, even when I was a kid.

So now it's September, which I view as a "gateway month": it's the gateway to my favorite time of the year. The onset of fall always excites me; it's the time when I feel most alive. I can go outside without sweating; I can start wearing long-sleeve shirts and overalls again; I can eat the local apples to my heart's content. I can cook on the grill and stand a bit closer to it because it's actually cool outside. I can go for an evening walk and not wear sunglasses. And I can talk about football in the present tense, and I think about the stories again.

Of course, we're not quite there yet. It's still Summer, really, as defined by the motion of the Sun between the two Tropics. The first three weeks or so of September are still kind of warm, but comfortably so, when the A/C is shut off for the year, but also not really cool yet to the point where we close the windows in the morning when we get up to an apartment that's too cool and cup our hands around that first cup of coffee because we're not really warm yet.

I'm always a bit impatient during the first part of September. Part of that is probably a holdover from my childhood; there's always anticipation leading up to your birthday when you're a kid, and mine's at the end of September. But it's also the period when I'm eagerly checking the ten-day weather forecast, looking for days when the highs are to be, say, 68 and the lows 42. In a way, this is Summer's loss, since the last month or so of Summer here in Buffalo is the very best the season has to offer, but by this time, after suffering through our usual over-hot July and comfortable but still warmer than I like it August, I don't really want to muck around with mid-70s and low humidity. I want to get right to the mid-60s, with the guy on TV using words like "crisp" when describing the next day's weather and with that one tree that always turns two weeks before all the others (you know the tree I mean) going red and with the promise of our wonderful Buffalo snow to come.

There's a saying in showbiz and writing that goes, "Always leave 'em wanting more." Summer here always tries, but for me, it's never quite enough. If July was like early September, maybe I'd view its annual departure with a little more of that feeling of wistful nostalgia that summer is supposed to be about. As it is, though, Summer is doing its grand finale and Autumn is waiting in the wings.

I'm ready.