FAREWELL TO SUMMER

                                              

So it’s the weekend after Labor Day Weekend in the lakes country. It’s a time that is a simple carbon copy of yesterday except the sunlight is three minutes shorter and its strangely quiet at the lake today. Memorial day and Labor Day, the alpha and the omega of summer, have come and gone and now we wait. We wait for the leaves that are already turning, to fall from the trees. We wait for eager children, with backpacks on, crowding onto school buses once again. We wait for the orange-coated hunters and the shooting to began. The fields will be stripped of their bounty and grain bins and corm cribs will be full to bursting at the seams. We wait for that morning when you wake up and the ground is white once more and fall and summer will have slipped quietly away and it’s one more summer for the old memory bank.

Late fall and the months of the year seem to share a likeness that tugs at an old mans heartstrings, because the calendar of months and days of the year seem so intertwined with our own inner calendar. The white hair, wrinkles and sore joints, are so reminiscent of better days, like a summer now gone by. But then the last days of many things in our life, evoke some degree of sadness. All good things do come to an end. Be it the last day on your job before retirement or maybe your kids moving out and moving far away. Maybe it’s the death of a loved one and the end of an era. Maybe it’s your favorite Pastor at your church moving away. Life seems to be full of a litany of sad endings for all of us.

But as sad as the end of summer is and all of the other changes that are coming our way, there is a glimmer of hope, that in a few months the earth will tilt in our favor again and a Minnesota summer will come back to please us once more. That many of these sad endings I just mentioned, are just preludes to new beginnings. One door closes, another opens. We have no idea when we too will end our journey and be called home and little control over it; so sad endings are best forgotten until we have to deal with them. Maybe forgotten is a bad choice of words because some things do need remembering but at the very least we need to set them aside and try not to let them ruin the future. Tears are put there to wash away our sadness and pave the way for a smile but at least for a while you need to let them fall. For every friend you lose, the opportunity is there for a new one in your circle of life-- if you only look around. I have many dear old friends but as precious as they are, there is always room in my life for another.

But back to the end of summer. Mother nature is a busy gal and she needs a break and winter gives her that time to rest. For it’s in winter that the plants and many of the animals go to sleep too. Those that don’t either leave or take it easy for a while. But for mankind, we are driven and there is no resting until the body and mind simply won’t respond anymore. Then all we can do is dip into our memory bank and redigest the good times once more. Lauren DeStefano wrote and I quote. “Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”