Out of Season

You are going to encounter people this weekend who will tell you that there’s one week left of summer. You don’t have to believe them. You don’t have to be one of them.

You can join me and the other equinoctials (do you think this term could catch on?) who live by the almanac. We’re not going gentle into our woolly cardigans until Sept. 22, the actual first day of fall. We’re savoring every last tomato, still sentimental about late sunsets, weirdly fond of that residual itch in a fading mosquito bite.

Every time summer turns to fall, I do this. I try to articulate to anyone who will indulge me why one time of year is better than another, to make a case for why light and warm is superior to dark and cold. It’s a losing game: I’m burning whatever daylight is left arguing for why the earth should revolve differently, powerless against nature. I feel like Werner Herzog in “Burden of Dreams,” railing at the jungle: “Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe.”

There is no harmony in the universe, so we try to create some with the calendar. Labor Day arrives and we shift gears, shift wardrobes and menus and mind-sets. Maybe our gaits get faster. Summer self is self-indulgent; fall self is all determination. Summer self puts things off and fall self gets things done. There’s a harmony and a rhythm to our seasonal incarnations that keeps things interesting, divides existence intomovements: adagio, andante, allegro.

“Transitions are hard,” a colleague said to me today. She was joking around, being melodramatic about how she’d just arrived at the office and needed a minute to collect herself before a meeting began. But the transition from summer to fall, as anyone who’s ever tried to get a child ready for the first day of school can tell you, can be a particularly challenging one. And it doesn’t necessarily get better when you’re decades removed from going to school yourself. Summer’s all potential, all expectation. The end of summer is, inevitably, some of that potential unrealized, some of those expectations unmet. A little mourning might be appropriate.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Whether you believe that summer’s finito in a week or that we’ve still got time, there’s this weekend to exploit. This weekend, late August, 2024, wherever you find yourself, however you find yourself. Will you be stocking up on school supplies? Dropping someone off at college? Will you spend the weekend hunting down the perfect peach? Maybe you’re working, or worrying, or lying in a hammock watching the clouds. What do you want to do? How do you want things to go? This weekend, like every weekend, you’ve got choices.