In Southeastern New England we're at that point on the seasonal roller-coaster ride approaching the weightlessness of being. That is the moment after the moment when you've peaked and are nearly starting down the incline-in a roller coaster I've often suspected if we could actually float in the air, which would be the moment we would, but only for a moment.
It's the same with the weather. The calendar says summer is gone-some kids went back to school while others are going back even as you read this, but the warmth of the sun is both welcome and very real and there are plenty of mild days but (maybe just me?) they seem to take longer to start and they feel like they end sooner.
When I get up in the mornings now more often than not, I have a light sweater or jacket on for the first time since, thinking back, I'm guessing the early part of May. It was nice while it lasted, right? And my after-dinner walk around my neighborhood has been moved up and shortened because the disappearance of the light in the evening disheartens me.
On an oh-bright-early Saturday morning walking around Spaulding Pond in Mohegan Park, a gem we have in Norwich that we really don't use enough (and I'm not just speaking for me), with wonderful hiking trails, wide sidewalks, and well-paved roads I could see far more autumn foliage in the tree canopies overhead than when I was there just a few Saturday earlier.
In a couple of more weeks, lots more of the sky will peek through as the leaves turn brown and then fall off and the bare limbs will eventually win out. That's when I'll stop coming up there and, based on the number of smiles and nods I did with passers-by, I wasn't the only one adding memories to my end-of-summer scrapbook.
I'm preparing for the part of the year I dislike the most-real fall, not the Second Summer part which doesn't fool, or placate, me anymore but the slate gray sky and the chill in the air of autumn that makes it very clear winter is approaching. Winter (and you may find this funny and/or pathetic) I can deal with because I know spring and summer follow. It's fall that's the hopeless and helpless season in my book, a time of inevitable decline and deepening dark.
I've been in a hurry most of my life-always rushing to somewhere or away from someone. The pace is less frenetic now, the strides more measured and labored. I passed a couple on Chelsea Parade recently pushing a small child in a pram and could see in my mind's eye my wife and me with our children at a duck pond where Frankfurt am Main ended and Offenbach started. They/we looked so happy and the horizon was wide open. For us, that was over thirty-five years ago, gone in the blink of an eye.
The high school girl who jogged past me, in the opposite direction, earbuds (we would have called them headphones) in place and a solemn face like a mask could have been our daughter Michelle, the picture of concentration as she practiced for her audition for her high school's musical honor society (and blew the judges away). That was almost two decades ago. The memories fade but the scars from the passing of time remain.
I was there for all those moments and tens of thousands more but, like now (I imagine), I was thinking about other places and times. Just as we all do, I'm sure. "Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars. I fear I'll do some damage one fine day. But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers-still crazy after all these years."
-bill kenny
-bill kenny
