Summer Swan Song

"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer." - Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

I used to read Dandelion Wine every summer, in June, because it is so evocative of the season, pulsating with the blossoming warmth of possibility offered by yet another magically carefree intercession in my regular life. I don't really have time to read Dandelion Wine anymore, but I still think of it at every summer's beginning and close.

I adore autumn, I do. But even now, at 28, there is something positively devastating to me about the end of summer.

When I was younger, my favorite holiday was July 4th. I know, I know...weird. There are no presents or really even that fun of decorations for Independence Day, but I just loved it. It was the perfect calendrical placement of a holiday: long enough into summer that I had settled into a routine of sunscreen, chlorine, and popcicles, but far enough from back to school that I didn't have to worry yet about the hot, drowsy days coming to an end. The day itself was usually blazing yet lazy, and then the night...the noise was skittishly exciting, and the transgression of staying up way too late, waiting for it to be dark enough to do fireworks made me feel so grown up. Even now, I have dense and powerful memories of happiness associated with the abrasive, acrid smell of fireworks, and I still like to watch them, especially as they explode over Manhattan, setting that infamous skyline ablaze in washes of pyrotechnic color.



Oh...those summer nights.

I'm nervous to be old enough to start feeling nostalgic about my younger days, but summer nights in Utah when I was growing up were simply the most spectacular gift offered by nature. The dry desert days would just bake the earth and then, at night, all that heat was released, creating an intoxicating mix of warmth and darkness, all set to a backdrop of crickets chorusing away. Summer dances were full of possibility, and one of my first experiences with love was full of the blissful carefree blooms of summer flirtation. He would drive me home in his open-top Jeep, and I would lean back, drinking in the overwhelming profusion of stars cluttering the sky. I never needed a sweater.


I think my profession continues to promote this sense of summer as a period of my life outside the numbing structures of time. Since I teach, I get my summers off (in theory) and am rarely beholden to solid deadlines, and though I always have great plans for all the work I'm going to do, I usually end up enjoying the slow peaceful days, pushing responsibility further and further into the fall. My summers in New York have been as magical as ever: long, dwindling nights on the patio amongst the fireflies, equally long, salty days at the Jersey Shore, each usually capped off with a lush serving of fresh summer berries and cream.


The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Harvest Moon"


So, summer ends. Or, more accurately, ended last Monday. But this, too, is what makes summer so remarkable: it is fleeting, a rare gift, and something to dream of and remember in that dark, dreadful dungeon known as February. In Dandelion Wine, they preserve the eponymous liquid in bottles in the basement, and in the winter, when they simply cannot bear the cold greyness anymore, they get it out and have a thimble full: sunshine in a bottle. I just have my memories of summer to last me through the rest of the year, but this...this is enough.~L