End of Summer Daze

First published in my print column, The Nature of Things

Though Labor Day weekend signals the official end to summer, I find myself reluctant to throw in the towel just yet. These in between days that no longer seem like full-on summer, but really aren’t yet autumn are important to savor.

Must be the age I am now that inflates the significance of these fleeting days of seasonal shift. Kind of like where I am in the seasons of my own life. In transition. No longer what I once was, but not yet fully what I am to become.

If I were a late summer day, manifested in human form, I would wear sunflowers tangled into my wind-blown hair, my feet, bare and dusty, would dance through meadows of watercolor hues—green fading to gold, blue-grays blushing silver.

An open sky mind of cloudless thought might inspire a deep breath—the kind that would fill me up all the way down to the soles of my feet, and leave me clean from the inside out when I exhale. And in the hard-hitting sunlight late in the day, I would be like the bleached sand of the blowouts that swirl up on the breeze sighing its resignation to the gathering dusk.

As evenings grow cooler and the first glint of gold in the tree tops begins to peek through, summer’s mortality becomes achingly apparent. It becomes impossible to behave as though it will last forever—like we do in those early days in June when the garden is up and the roses are out and the bleak barren days of winter can barely be remembered, overpowered by the sight of so much green.

It is only as the summer’s glory goes into wind down that we again see the season for what it is: transient, temporary, limited, finite. Like the summer season of our own lives that can’t go on forever.

So take time to pay attention. To notice the sunflowers before they drop their sunny heads, to smell the cool vapor of the early morning air pressing against the warm cheek of the earth. To hear the doves calling their mates home in the evening, and the sweet cooing song they sing when they’re together.

As sure as the rising of the sun this season will turn; the things we take for granted today, tomorrow will be gone, replaced by the realities of another season.

Who’s to say which one is better than another, or how many more we will get to see?

Just to be on the safe side, best to relish every one.