Sunday, September 2, 2007

When The Summer is Over


When the summer is over you can feel it mostly in your heart. When the days stray too far from those August afternoons where your whole perspective is so warm you feel like a sunset within. The summer is over when you get that first chill in the morning. It rattles right down your spine as if winter itself shot a single icy raindrop down the opening in the back of your shirt. Winter gives you a taste, not the main course. Autumn is a hypnotist apetizer. A few chilly afternoons, a succession of rainy mornings, might as well be a swinging pocket watch in front of your mesmerized eyes. Fall's soothing psychologically pinpointed voice saying, its getting darker and darker and darker. Summer doesn't end all at once, it fades without permission. It kind of ends like accepting a love ones death. You deny it at first, you reminisce about it trying to bring it back until one day usually in October you accept it. That is when the summer is over. When you put on a sweater, summer is over. When you bury your face in the nape of a jacket, summer is over. When a cool drink makes your hand painfully cold instead of being a relief from the swelter, summer is over.
Summer is freedom. Its freedom from the indoors. Its freedom from clothing. Its freedom from force. Its movement and laughter and running and jumping and airplane winging your hands through the wind out the side of a car with the window down. Summer is the smell of charcoal burquette barbeque smoke. Summer is bike riding. Summer is outside dining. When you hug someone in summer you are not separated by layers of clothing. You can smell earth in the summer. You can sleep outdoors. You can be the type of free that only comes from going to get the mail barefoot.
Summer must end though. The sweet is never so sweet with out the bitter. What is a summer romance without a fall tragedy. Tears feel unnatural against a summer sky. Tears are suited for the sting that can only come from a icy early winter evening. Fall is that descent from glory to tragedy that we need yearly to remind us to enjoy the explosions of joy that happen at times. Summer would be commonplace without the fall. The fall from warmth. The fall from freedom. The fall from content hours of late setting suns. We need the icy fall to wake us up from our dreams. We need the freezing kiss of wind that reminds us we are not immortal. Without that cold, falling reality check we would go on living forever. And, what is life without death.

2 comments:

Susan Iverson said...

I love reading your thoughts. You can put them together like no one else I know. It makes me so proud!

Anonymous said...

You have brought tears to my eyes. It's so refreshing... this feeling your words have left me with. *speechless*


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