Summer’s End.
Schools are starting to go back into session but for me, even when I was a student, summer isn’t really over until the end of August. The days are already getting shorter. Just a few weeks ago if I woke up in the dark I could roll over and eventually go back to sleep. Now when I wake in the dark it’s because the alarm has gone off and it’s time to get up. But it still feels like summer, or it did until earlier this week when I went outside and was shocked by how cold it was. Overnight the temperature dropped almost thirty degrees. It climbed back up with the sun but the change was still a reminder that summer is ending.
The trees haven’t started to change yet. They’re still full of bright green leaves. The hickory tree in the front yard is still forming its nuts; it’ll be a while before their deluge drives us nuts. The insects, though, have gotten the message. Even in the morning cold I could hear crickets calling to each other, katydids in the trees, and a few late season cicadas ratcheting away, desperate for one last chance. The end of summer always brings an urgency. Those who sing away most of the season in the dark continue to do so even after dawn; their lives are so compressed an hour must pass like a year.
Once I was lucky enough to start school after Labor Day. It was the start of seventh grade, the start of a new school for me, which was intimidating. I’d gone to the same school from kindergarten through sixth grade and most of my classes were in the same room, or adjacent to each other, and even by second grade I’d gotten to know the layout of the whole school, which was all one level. Seventh grade was a complete change; classes were held in different rooms, on different floors. We were given cards with our teachers’ names and their room numbers and expected to find our way. The first day everybody was allowed some leeway; there was a lot of ducking in and out of wrong rooms and teachers were patient. The second day everything changed. We were all expected to have the schedules and locations of everything down.
In the night between the second and third day a miracle happened: the air conditioning for the entire building broke. An emergency notice went out to parents that summer break would be extended just a little longer. In the end that meant over a week. It was September before we were able to go back in cool comfort, which, I think, meant more to the teachers than it did to any of us. Even though I wasn’t able to go back to the building during that time it did allow me to accept how much things had changed.
The only downside was having to wake up in the dark, but that too would have come no matter what.