A Season Comes and Goes

(I was unable to create my fourth post yesterday, but here is my annual meditation on summer.)

Each year, when this point comes, I start thinking that I need to capture my thoughts about summer.  Each year I forget that I have already done this (as in here and here).  But that's not necessarily a bad thing, because each year I feel something slightly different about the summer months.  

One thing that surprises me about my forgetfulness is what has become an annual climax to summertime: the Perseid meteor shower.  If you read the posts from the links above, you'll noticed I started trying to observe this phenomenon in 2009.  My memory is sketchy, but according to the posts there have been good times and bad times.  I didn't write it down, but there was one year when I took a piece of rhubarb pie and a Lienkugel's Berryweiss to the hill in Bear Creek Park and had the greatest star-gazing experience ever.  It was probably a combination of the (relative) cool of the night, the celestial activity, and the delicious food and beverage, but I recall it quite fondly.  Even if there are no shooting stars to be seen (like last night), it's an important ritual that I like to observe.  It brings a punctuation mark of the paragraph entitled "Summer" in each year of my life.  

But I digress.  The main theme of my writing this year centers on how absolutely fantastic summer is, and how the songwriters get it exactly right.  I'm thinking here of the line from "Summer Lovin'" in "Grease," "summer days drifting away...", or the Beach Boys "won't be long 'til summer time is through" from "All Summer Long."  Can you think of another moment/season in your life that brings such enjoyment and yet while you are enjoying it you are aware that it will soon be over?  I don't think it's the same with Advent or Easter, because with each there is build-up and a culmination.  For some reason most people long for the rains of spring to blow away, or the frost of winter to retreat.  No, summer is special, and I think it is precisely because it is so sweet and so fleeting.  Shouldn't every experience in life be lived like summer?  "Let's enjoy it now, because soon it will be gone."  Summer is a seasonal reminder to savor each lick of ice cream, to embrace your children every chance you get, to smile and thank God for his blessings, because each will be gone before we realize it.  We don't like to think that.  We want to enjoy the good things in life as much as possible, and so we block from our minds the fact that it won't always be as it is now.  Saints of old employed the "Memento Mori" to meditate on death and remind themselves to live.  I love summer for its slowness--days that stretch forever, filled ease and recreation--and yet it is also often noted for its swiftness as it speeds away.  The beauty of that has really hit me this year.  

This is the perfect song for this post, I think.  My first memory of really engaging with this song is from my Grandma Asp's funeral.  We were driving back from her gravesite to where we were staying and I played this on my ipod as I watched the golden Minnesota landscape slide past in that beautiful and sacred hour of dusk.  The song is beautiful and melancholy.  It is an ode to summer's end.

Each summer is bound to end.  The best we can do is not to cram it full of activity, or waste it away, but to live with its end in mind.  Savor the slow, sweaty, golden moments.  And when the meteors begin to shoot through the Perseids, look up, smile a thoughtful smile, and agree with the Beach Boys: "we've been having fun all summer long."