The Labor Day weekend represents the official end of summer, I don’t care what the calendar says. And with it comes the oddest feeling of both deja vu and the passing of time.
Maybe it is because we get all four seasons here in New England that each one seems more distinct. Growing up in South Carolina, winter was more of a week long concept than an actual season, and spring is the brief transition where it wasn’t so humid that you needed a shower within 15 minutes of leaving your house. The other season, which I dubbed sprummerall, was pretty much the rest of the year in my book. The air conditioner needing to be turned on for Christmas Day was not an isolated memory.
The onset of fall in New England is both a weather and visual event. The leaves changing colors is really a visual treat, and the sense of another year beginning–because let’s face it, no one wants to believe that a new year of life begins in the winter–is palpable. I’m sure that this time being a definable milestone also has something to do with the whole back to school regimen, which seems even more poignant when you have someone in the family in college, because they physically leave you to return to campus.
It is also fair season, which is that American tradition of celebrating the end of the harvest with an odd collection of agricultural expositions, carninval rides, food oddities and rigged games where you can drop 20 bucks for a 2 dollar stuffed animal.
Yes, I am a little bummed out by the end of another summer. Probably because I didn’t spend enough (as in any) time at a beach this year, which really is one of my favorite places to be. Football returns this weekend on the college level, which means the professional mutation isn’t far behind. The holiday season shows up in the blink of an eye, so it won’t be a prolonged depression over the change in seasons.
I’ll try to enjoy the fall a little more than usual, but with budget battles, the prospect of the political race taking on the tone of a WWE pay-per-view event, and with the inevitable unknown and unforeseen things that will fall into the lap, like so many leaves from the oak trees outside…I’m probably going to be more melancholy than usual for a bit.