It is the dead of summer – that moment in the life and time of the Summer of 2019 when there is as much summer ahead of us as behind.
For those of us who love the New England summer, who deplore its brevity, who wait months for its coming only to watch it fly by like a race horse in an instant, the dead of summer moment is something to savor.
It is something to savor because the summer will be gone in a flash. At this very moment, we are dead in the thick of the heat and the warmth. We head out to the beach. We sit inside wanting to do nothing. We go on vacation. We try to concentrate at work.
Work seams meaningless when it is the dead of summer.
At this juncture, the Fourth of July remains in our minds. The essence of everything that is the New England summer is bound up in reaching the Fourth of July.
Then the Fourth comes and goes like a fast moving rainstorm like with the snap of a finger.
Then comes the week after the Fourth when we are still in the very thick of the summer, in the throes of the joyousness that comes with the heat, the breeze off the ocean, the thunderstorm clearing the air and dropping the temperature – and then going out on a summer evening.
At times it seems as though it might go on forever. But it doesn’t. It never does.
Nature indulges in no such fantasies.
One month from this week and we will be facing the coming end of summer, feeling all the lamentations that go along with such thinking. Right now, the only thing to do, is to enjoy to its fullest, and to live to its greatest measure, this moment in time, The Dead of Summer, 2019.