September 2, 2019

End of Summer

Yesterday I saw a boy wearing a hoodie. I said to myself, it’s official, summer is ending.

It’s not the first football game (which was yesterday Colgate vs Villanova) which marks the beginning of the end of summer or school books or pumpkin spice coffee ads at Dunkin Donuts but that boy in his hoodie. The hoodie will get heavier and heavier until it becomes a down jacket with a hood in December or even November.

On the farm I watch my husband dig and mulch to protect the flower beds he has spent so much time on in spring and summer. I hear the calls of the sandhill cranes as they prepare to fly away and watch as they soar overhead. The monarch butterflies we bred for weeks and weeks still flutter between milkweed blossoms, but I know they too will be leaving us soon for the long journey to Mexico. I will miss them and the other butterflies and even the bees.

The corn is high now. But the days are cool and the nights even colder. Yes, it’s Minnesota, but even for Minnesota it is colder than the end of August should be. Will the frost wait a few weeks for those anxious farmers to harvest the corn? But I fear that this run of sixty- and seventy-degree days and fifty-degree nights are too cold.

This world, this life, this farm move in continual transitions as each thing blossoms then fades and moves on. So, we pick the apples from the tree in front of the barn and smile and remember the summer that gave them to us.

As I walk the dogs, I marvel at how quickly the days begin to shorten. Dawn comes later and dusk earlier. The sun sits low on the horizon—it is a fall sun, a September sun. The leaves on our boxelder and silver maple—are beginning to turn color as summer’s green mantle transitions to gold and yellow.

Fall is my favorite time of year. The last of the summer harvest yields up pumpkins, squash, and gourds. Soon setting a fire in the fireplace will replace suppers on the patio. And dusting off wool jackets, sweaters, mittens and scarves becomes akin to greeting old friends.

“I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye”
- from Life of Pi