Summer’s over. We mark it unofficially with Labor Day, as if to say, “Time to get back to work.” Summer ends not with a bang but with a whisper. Some bid farewell with a hushed “good riddance,” others with a more funereal release. We declare summer over, with relief or regret, and turn toward the year’s final third, with eagerness or reserve.
The weather either overwhelmed or underwhelmed, climate change clearly altering a season we once cherished. Health issues complicated my summer, but Wednesdays with my grandsons continued, running the gamut from the Museum of Science and Industry to the Museum of Ice Cream and everything between (Brookfield Zoo, Morton Arboretum, bowling, skeeball at Enchanted Castle, Puttshack and Millennium Park mini-golf, the Art Institute, the Harry Potter Superstore on Michigan Avenue, the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art (stones and gems). I enjoyed a few precious visits with granddaughter Charlotte, soon to turn 4, who is gifted at picking out creature shapes in the summer’s migratory clouds.
The Odyssey was the big movie event of the summer, which I saw twice and understood once. Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and Project Hail Mary with Ryan Gosling were the two other notable blockbusters. I didn’t see Spiderman because I’m done with superhero flicks.
Our baseball teams exceeded expectations, the White Sox wildly, and I spotted the ultimate baseball honorific: a single white sock dangling from someone’s rear fender on Harlem Avenue, a tribute to the long-suffering fans of a team that lost over 300 games the last three seasons, but miraculously spent most of this summer in first place.
Witnessed were the solstice sunset and a lunar eclipse. Late evening and early morning daylight, deeply savored. Reading in the park on a bench while the early morning sun is still friendly. Dressing light. Attending three plays in one week, two of them outside, accompanied by a host of fireflies. The season when one of my favorite night sounds (crickets) follows one of my least favorite sounds (cicadas). Winding down, reducing stress, slathering on sunscreen and letting the rays have at you.
A time to realize you’re not so young anymore but not so old that you can’t live life a little fuller, and time itself warrants a different reckoning. When you lose your hurry, you can recollect — and re-connect with — who you are.
I stayed local for the most part this summer, but several of us marked the season’s end with a long drive to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to visit friends who have taken permanent refuge there. They live on a lovely lake, where the still water impersonates liquid glass yielding to the blades of a kayak’s double-edged oar, gliding toward the far bay where a 101-year-old woman lives alone on her own and probably doesn’t mind if you tarry a few moments to wonder about her. If she’s anything like me, she keeps the windows open whenever possible to remove the distinction between outside and inside. Meanwhile, the puttering of an outboard motor awakens echoes of long-gone vacations in these same Northwoods.
The end of summer is tinged with just such memory melancholy, accompanied by a little gladness for the coming coolness, tingling anticipation of the Big 4 holidays to come, and a mellow afterglow as summer gradually dissolves into autumn.
We don’t mark the end of fall or winter or spring with regret — one less in a dwindling number — but we do with summer. At least I do.
No one has written about summer and its end quite like Ray Bradbury, so I’ll give him the final words for this season:
They left the mellow light of the dandelion wine and went upstairs to carry out the last few rituals of summer, for they felt that now the final day, the final night had come. As the day grew late they realized that for two or three nights now, porches had emptied earlier of their inhabitants. The air had a different, drier smell … the open, white-flutter-curtained windows were closing in the great bays. … Now Tom and Douglas and Grandfather stood, as they had stood three months, or was it three long centuries, ago on this front porch which creaked like a ship slumbering at night in growing swells, and they sniffed the air. … But the new cold touched Grandfather first, like a raw hand chording the yellow bass piano keys in the dining room. As the compass turns, so turned Grandfather, north.
“I guess,” he said deliberating, “we won’t be coming out here anymore.”
And the three of them clanked the chains shaken down from the porch-ceiling eyelets and carried the swing like a weathered bier around the garage, followed by a blowing of the first dried leaves. Inside, they heard Grandma poking up a fire in the library.
The windows shook with a sudden gust of wind.