Tomorrow is the unofficial end of summer. My family will gather for one last barbecue and the kids will swim in the pool one last time. Hot dogs and burgers will be cooked on the grill and everyone will talk about what’s coming up in the fall. We’ll throw around a baseball and swat mosquitoes. Good stuff.
But the forecast is recording an oddity. At least it’s odd for this year. We have a seven-day forecast where the chance of rain is zero. So now that it’s September and the kids have to retreat to the schoolroom it’s going to be real summer weather with highs in the nineties, something we rarely saw at all in July and August. Ah, the weather gods!
Well, it’s very ungracious for the kids but a late blast of heat will be welcomed by me. It won’t revive my vegetable garden or provide new life to the flowering plants but it will provide a backdrop to enjoy the transition to autumn. And it will give me a chance to do some of the repairs and the preparation for winter. I can collect up all the yard and lawn equipment and store it away more carefully than I usually do and fix that gate that’s been hanging crooked for a couple of years. And this year I’ll bed down some of the more sensitive shrubs so they don’t get frost-burned if the snow cover fails again.
So, the late heat wills serve a purpose. But more than that it will give me a chance to reflect on 2023. Most people do their thinking in the winter. The long evenings and the retreat from the outside are conducive to reflection. But I like late summer. I like to walk around after the kids are back in school and think about how the world is shifting. I like to feel the shift in the cycle. The days are already shorter but the heat of summer is still there and the growth is about to stall. It’s like we’re at the top of some kind of pendulum swing. The forward momentum has died and for just a second, we’re suspended in free fall, just hanging there. In the next moment gravity will pull us down, but just for that moment we can imagine the whole of creation at perfect equilibrium and with no future or past to consider. The Garden of Eden before the Fall.
And that’s the payoff of the year for me. If I can have those few golden days at the end, I’m reconciled to the reality of a New England winter. After all we’ll have Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas to break up the dreariness and I’ll be busy with work and snow removal and chores and I should be busy with writing so the time will pass. And Camera Girl will have her new puppy to keep her busy. So, the world will take care of itself.
But for just a short time every year I try to shake loose from the day-to-day thoughts and just try to feel the Earth turning under my feet, try to hear the cicadas running out of sap and watch the mechanical dragonflies winding down to a stop. At play in the fields of the Lord for at least one more year.