So after that other post the thoughts of life and death and round and round kept playing round and round in my brain. It brought to mind a Joni Mitchell song, "The Circle Game". She basically takes you through a person's life in the space of a 4 minute song. And that's bothersome on some level but mostly because IT'S TRUE.
I sent an e-mail to a friend recently about how much I hate the end of summer and when I detailed why I hated the end of Summer she wrote back that those were the very reasons she LIKED moving into the other seasons, she liked how orderly the other seasons are compared to summer.
Summer feels like endless time sprawling out without end. Summer is soft breezes, miles of sand and ocean; it's long, long days that just slip into night and the dawn comes quickly after. Summer feels unplanned and free without the passing of time but that isn't the reality. The reality is that even while we sit on the deck and watch dusk creep slowly from the sea and we sip our beers and margaritas and talk and laugh at nothing at all time is ticking on no matter how easy it all feels.
The end of summer brings those ordered seasons. It's back to school, then Halloween, then Thanksgiving and C'mas and New Year's Eve. They stack up at the gate like planes waiting to take off from Newark airport. Time is planned and ordered, commitments are made (where to spend the holidays, what to buy for whom, etc). This is what unnerves me and forces the passage of time on me. There are songs about this stuff, about being "in the autumn of my days…" and other references to the waning of life just like the waning of the seasons.
When summer lands on our sunny shores I see nothing but blue skies and amber sand and time STOPS. It stands still for those 10 weeks while we all become young again. We stay outside until well past when the street lights come on and enjoy the velvety warm nights and the sticky-sweet mornings.
Summer lets me be carefree again. I take long bicycle rides to nowhere and lounge in the pool even after a busy day at work. But autumn, no. Autumn doesn't lead to carefree fun it means buckling down. Autumn means finishing up projects before the end of the year. It means planning and planning and executing and planning. Not Summer, no way.
With all the talk of death and loss as the summer wanes it's hard not to look around and wonder how much will be different next Summer at this time. How much more loss will we suffer? How much more heartache and heartbreak? I'm not being a Nelly Negative here but it does kinda hit you that first week that you wake up at your normal time (5:30AM) and it's dark out instead of light, maybe some of that darkness bleeds over into where my head goes.
Will everyone I love still be here next year? I hope so but there have already been losses this year, some sudden, some expected but none of them welcome. I don't like this feeling of the passing of time, it goes too quickly. Why am I not still 22 or 26? Why can't I still fit in size 2? Why don't I stay out until 3AM and be ready for more of the same the next day?
No answers and no way to stop it, just carry on and hope for the best, it's all we can do but I sure wish we could roll back the clock to a lifetime of endless summer days and short summer nights.
And we do all go 'round and 'round and 'round in the circle game, don't we?
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