You can feel it slamming shut. Not the heat. Oh, no. Certainly not the heat. It keeps coming. Rolling up on you. Getting under your clothes. Taunting you — “Shrivel like a raisin, wimpy boy!”
I’m talking about the end of the summer. It’s coming. The intense heat of August is one of the signs — that the slow days and the easy times are just about over. School is about to start. Holidays are on the horizon. The good life is about to pick up the chairs and put out the “Closed ‘til next season” sign.
Have you noticed them? The signs? Here are a few I’ve been seeing:
• My summer to-do list now stretches to two pages — Nothing says the end of summer like an unfinished to-do list. Mine is yellowed with this written across the top: “Complete before June … OR HEAT WILL KILL YOU!!!”
Nope, didn’t do it. And certainly not the hot ones. Like the two items that required climbing into the attic. The attic! Bakeries ask if they can use my attic to bake bread. The heat coming off my roof generates updrafts that the FAA warns airlines about. The only way to go up there this time of year is completely naked and with a block of ice strapped to your head. Only, the block of ice melts in 15 seconds, and when you regain consciousness, you have to explain to the paramedics why you’re in the attic naked with a bow on your head.
All summer the list grew. It finally crested onto a second page. That’s when I know my opportunity is gone and summer is, too.
• I just got used to all the free time in the morning — It takes me a while, but by August I really learn to enjoy the slow sips of coffee while sitting in a quiet kitchen listening to the birds. I savor my Cuban coffee like wine. “Ahh … tastes like burned dirt with hints of charcoal and lighter fluid.” (Few people know this, but Cuban coffee was actually used as rocket fuel in the 1950s.) The sun rises slowly, and I casually flip through the paper. No child’s lunch box screams at me to make a peanut butter sandwich. Only, I’ve started to hear it’s muffled grumbling in the cabinet again. I know it’s coming. My mornings are about to take a hike.
• A new animal shows up — My wife is an assistant pre-school teacher. And pre-school teachers love to regale their new students with critters. Turtles. Hamsters. Wild badgers. And fish. There is a new fish in my house. Giggles! He showed up a couple days ago.
“Who’s the free-loader?!?” I asked. “And why’s he looking at me like that?”
Class fish, I was told. Just here temporarily. Acclimating. Getting ready for the big show.
New animal shows up in a teacher’s house, summer is just about history.
• I’ve started dreaming about next summer — Places I might go. Things I would like to accomplish. How I’m REALLY going to work on my to-do list. We always say you should end a trip by planning where you’ll go on your next one. Gives you something to get excited about. Especially when you return home and the reality of laundry and paying bills sinks in. Same thing with summer. As it comes to a close, your thoughts turn to the next one.
• I’ve fallen completely off the exercise wagon — No, not just fallen off. I’ve fallen off, I’ve been run over, and then it came back around to run me over again. I’ve gone up a belt buckle notch. People have started pinching my cheeks and saying, “Oh, look how cute the little chubby fella’ is. Oh, I could just pinch his cute, fat, chubby little cheeks all day!”
I’m not a baby, OK! It’s summer. It’s hard to get motivated to workout. Death by heat stroke or dehydration are not on my bucket list. So I always know the end of summer is coming when I not only resolve to get back into shape, but I actually start to do it.
• I start thinking about hurricane season — Or more precisely, how in the world I will evacuate three humans, a dog and a trio of chickens if the big one strikes. Do hotels allows chickens in rooms?
That was one of the things on my to-do list. Develop a plan. Hopefully the big one doesn’t strike.
So goodbye, summer. We hardly knew you. And I can’t wait ‘til you get back next year.