Summer's Over. Almost. And too soon.

From June solstice until September equinox, summer lasts only 91 days. It’s a bit longer when using the typical summer bookends of Memorial Day and Labor Day. Back in early May, it seems like so much time. Summer then is capacious. Stretching out before us, its arms open wide to good intentions. Here at last, we tell ourselves, is the one summer we’ll made good on our promises. We’ll deliver on our plans.

But the more we get into it, summer gets smaller, shorter, so unlike winter, the long winter, looming and too soon, on the horizon.

By the end of August, the days shrink with less light. The sun retreats behind the Camden Hills before dinner guests move on to dessert. Ferns crisp and goldenrod blooms. At the farmer’s market, apples bump aside berries. Lobstermen haul traps further out, as shedders, hardening up, move into deeper water. A large maple along the road sports a hint of orange. June’s timelessness vanishes. In memory’s eye, the 4th of July parade is a meteor that once flashed across the sky.

In these final summer days, I can’t help but assess. What, I wonder, of those new hikes I’ve yet to take, the books to read, recipes to try, people to meet? What of the constellations that this summer I pledged to learn? Or the pile of granite cobbles I thought for sure I’d transform into something attractive for the garden? And in the garden itself, why weren’t the small hydrangea bushes transplanted into a new bed or a new trellis erected for the sprawling climbing rose? Wasn’t this the summer I planned to learn, really learn, how to sea kayak? And where are all those poems I aimed to draft? The letters I’d actually, in a throwback, pen? Or those solo picnics on the shore rocks? Didn’t I promised myself more afternoon hours sprawled in the hammock with no other place to be?

How easy to lose and overcommit time in summer. One too many houseguests. One too many concert or theatre tickets purchased. One too many dinner invitations extended or accepted.  While, with a watch-maker’s precision, crickets thrum out the last of summer’s hours, it’s easy – too easy – to count up our regrets. To weigh and assess. To search, almost in desperation, for more uncommitted time.

For the lobsterman, farmer or inn keeper, summer is the “make it or break it” season. For them, it’s the season of economic necessity. Mostly, for the rest of us, for those retired and working on other things or able to work from our desk via Internet and phone, for the hardened gardener or veteran sea kayaker, the summer is the season of promise. Of brimming opportunity. Summer the season that in June holds forth so much fullness. And maybe what we reach for in it, what we try to make of it, what we promise ourselves to do with it, is a throwback to childhood. To a time when summers were long and the future distant.

But also back when, perhaps, summers sometimes seemed, well, a little too long. When, come August, we got a little itchy. Pre-Facebook and Internet, pre car pool or two-plus car families, we missed our friends. And whether we knew it or not, many of us missed the familiarity of small desks and wide school corridors. Of how, after spilling from sweltering classrooms, the daylight still lingered, enough to get in a few innings or laps on our bikes, and was sweeter than it had been all July and early August.  

Then, as summer simmered to its end, we may have whispered, if only to ourselves, “Yes. At last.” Translated now to: “No. Not yet.”