"Enjoy it while you can"
A young man passing by said to me, “Enjoy it while you can. Only two days left!” At first I thought he meant the pool, which may remain open as long as the weather holds out. Then I thought he meant summer, which, according to some calendars, ends with Labor Day. If he had excellent eyesight (better than mine, corrected), he may have been referring to Bristol Renaissance Faire, which is mentioned on my t shirt and which concludes tomorrow. I’m leaning toward the latter because of the oddness of the comment, shot at a stranger on the other side of a fence, and the way he was looking back at me when I glanced up, as though he were checking to see if I’d gotten the joke.
It does remind me that not everyone shares my view that summer is over only with the autumnal equinox.
When does your summer end?
While I know when it ends, canonically, I tend to think of summer as “over” starting September 1st. My kids are back at school and little hints of fall start cropping up here and there (though it won’t be fall weather in Oklahoma until closer to October!) Plus the stores have had Halloween crap out for weeks already, so it’s kind of hard for me not to start slipping into an autumn state of mind (not to be confused with a New York state of mind, the attainment of which generally centers around small, hairy Italian men).
Were you perhaps wearing white? (In other words, no white after Labor Day?)
Academic life ruins the seasons. “Fall” begins in mid-August, “Spring” in January.
Mary: Having no children, both my local (day to day) and global (year to year) sense of time is distorted. I have no school and no life events to regulate it. For example, a college friend found recently on facebook mentions a child out of the nest who I last saw as an infant. How and when does that happen? And when did I turn into an old cummer?
Michael: My mother obeyed those rules, especially with regard to shoes and pocketbooks. I was wearing yellow, but he possibly saw the Bristol Renaissance Faire on it. As for academic life, with UofC’s slightly offbeat quarter (vs. semester) system, fall begins after the Jewish holidays, so my seasons were different from everyone else’s there, too. Can’t win!
My summer definitely ends when we change our clocks back to standard time, or when I need to wear a jacket at mid day, whichever comes first.