SUMMER'S GONE!!??

It’s Labour Day and I’m gonna cry. As for the Summer of 2012…well…there it was…gone! I’m not even going to try to cover up my sadness. I really do not like the end of Summer. I’d say I hate the end of Summer but “hate” is such a strong word…but…wait a minute…yeah…never mind…I guess I DO hate the end of Summer!


You can pacify me by telling me that September is such a wonderful month and you can try to convince me that Autumn is such a beautiful time of the year with the leaves turning so many magnificent colours and everything and the bountiful harvest is welcomed and thanks are to be given and the new National Football League season starts and baseball playoffs begin and all the new fall TV shows come on and it doesn’t get so hot, (like that’s supposed to be a good thing!) and school begins anew and it gets darker earlier and it gets colder and then the frost comes followed by the inevitable snow… Yes, it’s true, Autumn can be a beautiful time of the year but it just comes up way too quickly for me, and the worst part…IT’S NOT SUMMER!

I don’t mean to drag all of you down with me, but, you know, “misery loves company”, as they say, and I’m sharing my misery. There’s a reason that, in poetry, Autumn has often been associated with melancholy. As stated above, the possibilities of summer are gone, and the chill of winter is on the horizon and, that, to me, is just sad.

Do you really think that August ending with a BLUE Moon was merely a coincidence? I don’t. Well, actually, scientifically, it was a scheduled occurrence because the Moon’s phases do not repeat very regularly: the time between two similar syzygies, (a straight line configuration of three celestial bodies i.e. the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, in a gravitational system), will vary between 29.272 and 29.833 days because the orbit of the Moon is elliptic and its velocity is not constant so the time of the true syzygy will differ from the mean syzygy which means the moon phases are irregular in time…oh, never mind...two full moons in one month!… it was a Blue Moon and that’s all we need to know! And we all know what blue means, don’t we?

Further adding to my blueness was the fact that my wife and I put on a little over 2000 kilometers in the car driving throughout the province of Saskatchewan over the last days of August, as we finished out our summer vacation, and I found it alarming to see the number of trees turning colour already and the flocks of Canada Geese honking their way down south. I’m no almanac contributor but aren’t those usually signs of an early winter, or something?

I would normally try to bring up some positive thoughts regarding the end of Summer and the beginning of Fall and I may have even touched on a couple of its positives in the writing above but, in the end, I’m happy to be miserable, if you know what I mean. Next week I’ll get all positive and I’ll start gearing up to embrace the changes in the seasons and brace myself for the fall chore list and everything but, until then, I am going to wallow in my sadness because you never know how happy you can be until you’ve experienced a little sadness every now and then.

“Sadness is but a wall between two gardens,”-Khalil Gibran-(1883-1931).