August Already?
“I’m so glad we had this time together,” that’s how Carol Burnett began the end of every one of her multiple Emmy Award-winning variety shows. “Just to have a laugh or sing a song.” For eleven years at the close of each episode, she walked to center stage and sang goodbye to her live studio audience as well as television viewers everywhere, “Seems we just get started and before we know it, comes the time we have to say, ‘So long.’”
Then the queen of making people laugh so hard they pee their pants, would tug on her left ear (a private goodnight to her grandmother) and she’d be gone.
That’s how it seems to work. The more funner the time we’re living, the fasterer it goes.
August 1st just showed up on my calendar. I thought my phone was lying through its screen. “It feels like summer just started!” my insides cried. I shook my fists at Father Time for rolling up the tent of days I’d so looked forward to. I stomped around and pouted, “We didn’t even get to go to the zoo!”
This happens toward the end of every July.
I see the em dash between the lazy, crazy days of summer and the buttoned-up business of autumn approaching, and I, like Wylie Coyote nearing the edge of an out-of-nowhere cliff, dig in my heels. I’m not ready. I’m never ready! August always gets here before I think it should.
According to the calendar, the summer season starts in the Northern Hemisphere on June 21st or 22nd and runs fast for roughly ninety-three days. Scientifically, it begins when it’s half over per our internal purview, and it doesn’t culminate until well after we’ve packed away our swimsuits and pulled our next-season’s schedules out. But the direction where Earth’s poles are pointing for a single second in time isn’t the event that we call summer.
The solstice is simply a seasonal symbol, summer is a stance.
This stretch of time that bridges spring to fall is one we pine for and point toward. It flashes like a neon exit sign, “Get off HERE. Turn left for a change of pace.” Summer is a license to slow down and savor time-- or ratchet up and hard-charge toward adventure, a permission slip to veer off whatever beaten path we’re on. It’s sunshine and water, fresh air and fresh perspective, a gap in the middle of the year we can take to forage, rise, unroot and explore.
And we cannot wait for it to get here. The window opens, we climb out and take off running. We go barefoot, drink loads of lemonade, find a spot to watch the sun set. We travel to places we have never been but always longed to go; we return to places we’ve been yearning to revisit for what they alone can offer though we know we cannot stay.
We welcome unclaimed time with inviting posture, then frolic in the freedom that lands in our lap.
Summer is a mindset attached to a span of time we spend the winter and spring dreaming and scheming about. Between a blurry beginning and a fuzzy finale, we choose to see the days in a different way. And we are ever glad we did.
August is two-finger tugging at my earlobe. “So long, summer, once again.”
P.S. The Boys of Summer