Summer's End

           These searing hot late summer days, they begin and end with a chill.  The day starts out at 50 degrees, and it's 90 by 3pm.  The morning mist out on the grass still calls to mind the diesel fumes and the metallic grind of long-ago school buses, the twinge of nerves (because I was always the new kid), the strange first days in an unfamiliar school.  These late summer days remind me of over-ripe tomatoes gathered in brown paper bags on the kitchen floor.  It's a bittersweet time.  Good-bye, summer.  I had so many plans and expectations for you, and most of them went unmet.  I was going to scrape and paint the shutters, build a stone casing around the old well, erect a fence to keep suburbia out.  I was going to be young again, if only for the summer.  I was going to be like a child, care-free, uninhibited, full of ideas.  I was hoping to see mythological green men in wild grapevines, the way I did long ago.  Something familiar was going to stir inside of me: that primal, almost sexual drive toward discovery and adventure.  It's the thrill of life that nowadays comes too infrequently and fades too rapidly.  I was counting on this summer to accomplish so many things.   Now I know damn well the lawn furniture will sit out until after Thanksgiving, as if waiting for one last bright day.

          And yet, this has been a good summer for me.  I hate dry conditions and heat waves, but in this blazing summer I got to go to Cambridge Springs, Chautauqua, and the Southern Tier of New York State.  I got to go paddling on French Creek, hiking the mountains at Blue Knob, and there were many excursions into the city.  These are the things that make a life, and it's from these things that we are left to build: A trail through patchy woods, a broad view on a clear day, a campfire with my three ladies, a picnic, a day at the office.  I can't escape the strange, persistent notion that time is somehow short.  It's not a Mayan calendar thing.  I don't believe in that stuff.  Maybe it's nothing more than that perennial autumnal wistfulness that afflicts me every year...but this year I think there's more.