Summer’s End

Summer always seems to go by too quickly — “Tempus fugit,” (“Time flies”) as the ancient Romans would say — and that is especially true when we’ve had a summer that just didn’t happen such as we have had this year. For those of us who look forward to the heat, humidity, and languid days (Nat King Cole’s “Hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer”) that make jumping into the cool ocean such a joy, the Summer of 2014 will best be remembered for its lack of summery weather. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, we don’t need a weatherman to tell us that this has been one of the coolest summers on record in the northern half of the U.S. Global warming may be the catch-phrase du jour, but climate change (or, as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to it a few years ago, “Global weirding”) is what we clearly are experiencing. About the only good thing to come from a summer such as we’ve had is that our electric bills are way down because our air conditioners have been used so infrequently. But whether summer weather has been good, bad, or in-between, the end of summer always means one thing: School bells soon will be ringing for our children. For thousands of families in our community, the daily routine of getting the crew up and out of the house early in the morning to get off to school will replace the casual, laissez-faire lifestyle that we and our children have led for the past eight weeks. We caution commuters who have become accustomed to streets without school buses and schoolchildren to exercise appropriate due care as we all become reaccustomed to school crossing guards, busy cross-walks, lower speed limits in school zones, and so forth. As this is being written,
there are about 10 days to go before Labor Day. Let’s hope we get a few days with temperatures in the 90s and hot, southwest breezes before we haul our boats and place them on their cradles for the long winter.