Summer's Over After the 4th of July

I remember my mother saying: "After the 4th of July, summer is over." What? We still had almost two months before school started. 

As I got older I realized what Mom meant. With all the work on the farm - threshing, baling hay, cutting oats, canning corn, beans, tomatoes and everything else from the garden - summer went by very fast. Squeeze in getting new shoes and some new clothes for school and summer was over.

This book was given to me by friends twenty years ago. I know I started to read it once because I left a bookmark in it at page 17. It just wasn't doing it for me. Too bland, uninteresting.... something was missing.

Apparently what was missing was my attention because when I started reading it last night I realized how beautiful these essays are.

This is how eloquently the author expands upon just what my mother said about the 4th of July.....

"From solstice till equinox, summer lasts only ninety-one days and six hours, a little longer if you count from Memorial Day till Labor Day. It seems like so much time. But the closer you get, the smaller summer looks, unlike winter, which looks longer and longer the nearer it comes. From a distance -- from April say -- summer looks as capacious as hope. This will be the season we lose weight, eat well, work out, raise a garden, learn to kayak, read Proust, paint the house, drive to Glacier, and so on and so on and so on. This will be the season in which time stretches before us like the recesses of space itself, the season in which leisure swells like a slow tomato, until it's round and red and ripe.

By the time Memorial Day comes and goes, flashing across the year like a meteor in the night sky, a certain realism creeps in. The universe expands but not the calendar. Only August remains infinite. June and part of July are already booked solid, and the trouble with that is that once an event is penciled in it's already over. The festival tickets you bought in April, when summer still had all its weekends, now haunt you with regret. The search for uncommited time grows more and more desperate. The peonies are nearly past, and before long the goldenrod will bloom. The field-crickets are already ticking away the seconds of full summer.

It's enough to make a person crazy, that dream of a summer where dawn is as cool as the ocean and the time in which you happen to live, the day and the hour itself, overlaps with all of the rest of time. Everyone reaches for fullness in summer, but the fullness that most of us know best belongs to the memory of childhood. What was it that made summer days so long back then and made the future seem so distant? What was the thing we knew or didn't know?"

The Iowa State Fair is about half over already.

Then the new school year starts.

And Labor Day comes ..... and goes...

Summer will be over - just that quickly.