Goodbye, summer. We hardly knew you.
How quickly those sun-drenched months came to a close this year. Always seems like there will be so much time — so much FREE time to just settle in, relax and enjoy the slow life. But the slow life isn’t ever slow. And before you know it, it’s gone.
It’s September already. September! The doorway to fall. Sure, it’s still 95 degrees outside and your underwear melts to your waist every time you walk outdoors. But September signals it’s over. Kids go back to school. Work gears up again. The streets feel busier and more bustling. People get more serious, more hurried and less relaxed. Vacations are just a distant memory.
In September, the light starts to change. Can’t you see it? The sky is bluer and brighter. The shadows linger longer across the land. The sun drops quicker from the sky like it’s late for a dinner party, and the dusk drowns the world in browns and golds.
The heat feels different, too. Not so oppressive or punishing. More lackadaisical and less angry. But as much as you dread, even despise, the heat, you know you’ll miss it.
I’ll miss summer. You never need an excuse to eat ice cream in the summer. You can eat it for breakfast in Florida and no one bats an eye. It should be required. Our state thing. It helps to cool you off. Otherwise it’s just too much heat. Although, I love the heat, too. I love sweating a city reservoir just bending over to tie my shoes. I love standing over a grill so hot it cooks your lips like sausages. I love how dirt spontaneously combusts.
Most of all, I love how summer reminds me of being a kid.
Summer always meant long road trips out west with my dad and brother — hiking in the Rockies or exploring little bits of nowhere. Summer meant the beach club at the Don Cesar Resort, a great big pink castle of a hotel that sits on St. Pete Beach. It dates back to the 1920s, and we were members of their beach club. My mother would cart us there every weekend in her white 1978 Thunderbird — T-tops always off — and we would eat hamburgers by the pool and stare at the English tourists who were ghostly white while we turned brown like oak trees.
The “Don” still had an old timey soda fountain that made Cokes from soda water and syrup, and we would sip that while our sun-burned backs sizzled like frying eggs.
Summer was staying out later at night — racing bikes down the hill of Sims park behind my house in Tampa until the mosquitoes clouded the sky like fog and calls from kitchens all over the block rang out: “Dinner! Get home … the pork chops are burning!”
Summer was scrapes from climbing trees and raspberries up your thighs from sliding through grass. Summer was when a sprinkler in someone’s yard became a water park. Didn’t matter whose yard — or even if you knew them. It was an unwritten rule that you could ditch all but the most vital clothes and run through it like a partially-naked man on fire.
Summer was that artificial, petroleum-laden taste you got in your mouth from drinking straight out of a garden hose. You drank from it like a dog. Like you hadn’t tasted water in weeks. It was hot and smelled funny, but few things tasted better.
Summer was never feeling cool. Never having clean feet. Living in a bathing suit. Going deaf from the 10 gazillion crickets outside your bedroom window. Walking around bare-chested for days on end like you were Tarzan. Turning the color of coffee.
Summer was sandspur patches and camp trips to local springs and out-of-the-way tourist attractions that no longer attracted tourists. It was decrepit buses that coughed their way down the road. It was meandering about the Tampa Museum of Art where my mother was a docent. My brother and I always seemed to have run of the house, and the security guards knew us by name.
Summer was never having a care in the world — not a single care in the world. And just like today, back then it went too fast. Over in a heartbeat. Ruined by September and that call of fall when things start to cool down, your tan goes away and eating ice cream for breakfast is suddenly frowned upon.
Goodbye, summer.