This week marks the end of summer.
As August turns to September, nearly all of us who have spent our lives in New England lament the passing of summer.
Summers are short. Our memories of some summers are lifelong.
There have been summers when we fell in love, when we fell out of love, when we roared in our youth at parties and summer style bashes, and there were summers when we couldn’t get up for any- thing, when we were sick, or recovering from illness or from the death of a love one.
There is not telling what a summer holds until it is done.
The summer of 2022 is done.
It is finished.
We waited all winter and spring for summer and then it just vanished, just like that, with the snap of a finger.
In the immortal words of Shakespeare:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.