The Summer is Not Passing

But the corn is already high. I am way out in the country on my bike and a field just two weeks before was short nubby green rows has now become corn higher than my waist. And it gets me thinking. Is the summer really passing? No. The summer is not passing. Then why do I notice the light changing already? What is that weird cool snap at night.

Ok. Cool Summer. We are not having a hot one so far. This is all just after Fourth of July jitters. There is still baseball. There is still the pool. The kids are still home. Nothing has changed yet. Fall is not close. We are at mid summer and there are many days of biking left. Still there is that nagging feeling that something is slipping away.  And you want to grab it before the water slips through your fingers like those old stone fountains you used to drink from at the playgrounds.

So I ride on and it is deep summer again. The slowed time is there. Summer is not passing. Still...the corn is high.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher on .99 Cent Kindle Download

Back To School

There they go again. Lunches and backpacks for their drop out of the mother ship. And there goes a daughter in a new dress and a son up before the dawn. The last one lines up with her new class. And we go about our daily routine. Another day but it does mark summers end doesn't it even though summer goes to the twenty first of September. And even on the bike ride you can hear the corn rustling now and the air has the dry feel of empty husks..the smell of harvest.

And we turn into another year while they greet new schoolmates and renew old friendships. The new teacher could be good or bad. The new desk is something to get used too and summer still yawns out that slit window open to the returning heat. Because summer does come back on the first day of school. It is part of the ritual. A cool summer then blazing heat for those first months of children stuck inside cinder block forts. If only the heat had come earlier.

And you think of all the things you wanted to do with your kids. You did some of them. Went to a ballgame. The pool. Vacation. But you worked a lot and you wonder if you should have spent more time with them while they were home. Because they are not now. They have left like the soon departing summer... and autumn is closing in.

The Pitcher...what a mom won't do for her sons dream

 

Where did the Summer Go?

You start out in early June telling yourself that summer is long. That you are just in the beginning of June and there will be unending days of sunshine and heat. And you feel good that the warm sunny days are just the beginning. And even when the fourth of July rolls around you still feel like there is lots of summer left. Why there is all of July and August! Lots of time to do all those things you do in summer. Like vacations. Swimming. Playing with the kids. Lots of time.

And then somewhere in July when the days turn weirdly cool you have a premonition. You think for the first time that the summer is half over and you better start getting your time in because it is going. So you go to that ballgame. You go on that vacation. You go to the pool. And then just like that it is August 1 and somebody has mentioned school and the summer camps are over and those weird cool nights are coming back already. Still it is only August.

So you roll along. You still believe there is plenty of summer left even though the grass is burned out and the trees look funny. The leaves are curling. Now there are a few more of those cool days and you realize the heat of the summer is behind you. Still. It is only August. But then comes the nuclear bomb of summer. About August 15 your wife or husband mention school is starting next week. What??????????

And that is it. School begins next Wednesday and the summer will end. Because everyone knows summer is over when the school year begins. It has always been that way. So now you are down to less than a week. And you realize, you have missed summer once again.

The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

 

Missing the Longest Day of the Year

Summer is fast. So fast that the longest day of the year has come and gone. Now we start a steady march to the short days of winter. June 21st is the Summer Solstice and I wish I had marked the day with some sort of reminder that life is what John Lennon said "the things we do between what we are planning to do." Or as a poet once put it" the way we miss our life is our life." Sad but true. And now we must grabs these summer days before the shortening twilight comes down on our summer hiatus.

"I always miss the longest day of the summer," Daisy Buchannan said in The Great Gatsby. "It always makes me sad that I miss the longest day." Her melancholy of course presages the life she is incapable of enjoying. We can relate. Twittering and surfing and glued to computer screens while the hot days of summer play outside our window we are incapable of enjoying the best days of the year. Children know. They know that when school ends there should be a respite, there should be the promised months of slow days. The agrarian cycle is the reason we give them off for the summer and we remember our own youth in those long days of lassitude.

But even children now suffer from our wired hyperactivity. Scheduled to the drum beat of camps and sports and any other thing overworked and stressed parents can come up with to keep their children occupied--there is little of the summer days that Scout and Jem enjoyed in To Kill A Mockingbird. Summer was a time to do nothing. Boredom is the luxury of children in summer and mostly we find those moments in literature now. Member of the Wedding, Mockingbird, Tobacco Sticks, these children drowse away their days in the slowed time of little to do.

Unfortunately those summers do belong to literature now. Children are wired the same way we are and those moments of slowed time belong to a day when the personal moment existed far away from some cyber reality. The best we can do now is try and catch a moment of summer and remember those slow days and maybe slow down ourselves.

Maybe in the end summer belongs to our youth--when the longest day of the year was still within our reach.