Somebody once said about some place, “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there”

I don’t know who said it, or where they said it about, but I feel the same way about August and summer time.

It’s not the end of summer, but you can see it from August.

How do you see the end of summer?  It’s not like fall when you can see the leaves change or the last one fall or the first snow flake.  

It’s not like winter into spring, when the ice melts or the first flower comes up.

I’m sure everyone has different things they see as the change of seasons, this is how I’ve seen the end of summer coming in August.

I’ve seen the end coming while working on a small farm near the lake. It had been a long summer working doing some pretty odd jobs.  I was hanging little bars of soap on little apple trees to keep the deer from eating them that day It was really hot and I was thinking about having to go back to school soon. In the afternoon a cold front rolled in ahead of a rain storm.  Standing on a small hill in an orchard of small apple trees, I could literally see the cold front.  The clouds cast a shadow as they moved overhead, and right at the edge of the shadow was a perfect line of fog.  The shadow and the fog both slowly moved toward me, they must have been a half a mile away when I first saw them.  I just stood there and watched it till it hit me.  It had to drop the temperature 20 degrees.  It felt good as the rain started, but at the same time, I knew it was the end of summer soon.

I’ve seen it in the sky at night.  I was talking to a friend one night.  Started out as a nice summer sunset, red at night, sailors delete kind of thing.   Then as I was looking over his shoulder, the sky turned GREEN.  Not gray, not black, GREEN.  The wind picked up, the leave turned over, and I got a chill.  My friend was talking away… about something, I don’t remember because I was watching the sky and wondering if  aliens were going to come out of the sky or a tornado was going to hit us,  not knowing what was up with the green sky.  The sun went down, the sky turned black and the stars came out.  It was just reminding me it was August, and summer was almost over.

And I’ve seen it in my mom.  Much as any of us hate to admit it, we’re all getting older and we’ve only got so much time and some of us got started sooner than others.  We’ll all go though the seasons of life, but always believe we’re in summer and will always be there.  One August a few years ago, mom wasn’t feeling well, had some type of bug or something.  She didn’t drink enough and got dehydrated and turned out to be really sick.  I had talked to her in the evening, and she felt lousey, but figured she be better the next day.  On my way to work I stopped by, something just told me to.  She was incoherent.  I called my sister, she called the dr he told us to call 911.  Mom wasn’t happy about the ambulance, but was too sick to fight it.  We got her to the hospital and they took care of her.  It was hard to sit there and just watcher her sleep, looking so frail, the lady who had been so tuff taking care of all of us growing up.   After time she got better, but you knew she’s never be the same.  She had lots of plans for things to do at the end of summer, but by the time she was home, it was fall, and she didn’t have the energy to do them.  We were so glad she was home and feeling better, but again we’d gotten a glimpse of the future, a glimpse of the end.

I guess that’s the duality of August; there are all the great things about summer.  Vacations and campfires and family picnics and swimming and memories you want to relive, but somehow you never can. And at the same time, there’s always that knowledge, that after August, summer is over.  It’s back to work; back to school back to real life all the things of summer comes to an end.

That’s why I’m not the biggest fan of the last month of summer,  the vacations are nice, the weather is great, but there’s always that end of it all looming, things changing and you can’t stop it or even slow it down.

 That’s August.

The lawns turn brown, the pools turn green, things are never quit the same.

It’s not the end of summer, but you can see it from August.