POLING: Summer days last forever but end too fast
Pulling into the driveway, I notice summer coming to an end.
Not an abrupt end. But just as jarring.
A change in moment.
The sun going down a few minutes earlier. Night falling just a little bit sooner.
A first hint that kids will be going back to school. That summer breaks and vacations come to a close. That the endless days do not last forever. That the green will eventually brown. That the golden glow stretching deep into evening will soon fade then darken into night, earlier and earlier each day.
Of course, each day has grown shorter since the summer solstice, the longest day, when sunlight stretches as far as it will go into night, when the sun dares the moon to show her face even after 9 p.m.
But it grows shorter by minutes, minute by minute, day after day, so slow, each day, that it's easy not to notice the shortening days, the shortened day. Each day looks so much like the slowly lengthening day leading to the solstice, like a slow-motion secondhand ticking up then ticking down each long, long day.
We do not notice each day getting shorter. So many reasons it is imperceptible.
Children ride their bikes, shouting and playing in the golden evening sun. Getting after-dinner ice cream on a weekday evening. Going on a drive past the city limits to see the countryside. Mowing the grass and working in the yard past 8, 8:30.
Taking the kids to football, soccer, volleyball practice in the "cool" when it's only in the 80s instead of the 90s ... most evenings. Getting off work with the knowledge we have hours of daylight left, hours of daytime still, to do, to play, to live.
And that feeling stretches much longer than the clock tells, it goes and goes past the solstice ...
Until that one evening when you notice, the shadows falling a little longer, the sun a little lower in the sky, the playing children off the streets a little sooner. Perhaps, it's a back to school commercial on TV or a school notice in the newspaper. Or maybe you're rinsing the supper dishes to look out the window and it's already dusk.
Each day has been shortening with subtlety but noticing the shortening days is sudden, as if all of those minutes disappeared all at once one evening. A dawning realization at sunset.
Summer is not gone. The season remains. Plenty time left to raise temperatures, to keep grass green, to rattle the sky with thunderstorms, to shake leaves in tree tops. We will still sweat in the humidity and seek cool places for weeks to come.
Summer hasn't gone. But summer is leaving.
Standing beside my truck, I see summer sinking in the sky, taking its toys home a little earlier each day. Noticing that first evening, summer will vanish bit by bit each coming day.
Kids will be back in school, after-school practices and games will start in full, homework and evening studies, getting up earlier means going to bed earlier, tick, tick, tick, shorter and shorter, each day will become.
Until we no longer notice the missing evening sun but dread the lingering summer heat, wishing only for the first cool day of some other season.
Some will wish for a return to those golden evenings that keep the night at bay, those days that seem forever ago and so far away on those evenings when it will already be dark by the time we leave work, those endless evening days of summer.
Days that last forever but end all too fast.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and an editor with The Tifton Gazette.
