The Bittersweet End of Summer

We’ve hit the midway mark of August; summer is drawing to a close. The end of summer is part of the natural order, and with it begins the annual migration of kids returning to college.

When your kids have grown up and they’re off to college or they’re living elsewhere, those nights when you go to sleep and they’re all under your roof are nights that make you happy. With the rarity of those times, they take on a value like the most precious of metals.

Living in State College, the summers offer opportunities to grasp memories for a lifetime.

Yesterday I took a ride down to Belleville to the weekly Wednesday auction and flea market. If you’ve never been, make it a priority soon.

This was an annual summer tradition for us when our kids were younger. The once- or twice-a-summer trips to Belleville started in the morning heading south on Routes 26 and 305. By late morning we’d assembled a haul of sweet corn, cantaloupes, peaches, peppers or tomatoes. There’d also be bags of breads, cookies and, most importantly; whoopie pies.

To be sure, since we do not live on a farm, we did not buy any livestock at the auction, but our young kids certainly weighed in, hoping maybe some chickens, ducklings, goats, lambs or cows could move in with us. Their pleas fell on deaf ears.

But the kids would all find some used treasures from one of the many flea market stands assembled there. One year a rubber chicken that made a loud honking sound. That chicken somehow went missing within a few days of that trip.

If the weather was right and we had the time, the way home meant grabbing sandwiches to have lunch and a swim at Greenwood Furnace State Park. It made for a short day trip, but a trip that created long memories, at least for this parent.

As parents watch their children grow up, it marks steps in their own stages of life. Those early years of being overwhelmed by this massive new responsibility are also marked by a sense of youthful excitement that these days will last forever.

But every parent learns one of the harsh truths of parenting and of life itself; the days may drag but the years will fly by. As we learned in Latin class with Mrs. Axt, “tempus fugit.”

And that’s the sadness that marks the end of August and the end of summer. Those days in May of anticipating your kids coming home from college for the summer give us an excitement that the house will be full once again. Then they arrive and it seems that there is a limitless supply of time together stretching out before you.

In State College, one by one we pass the big signposts on summer’s road: Memorial Day in Boalsburg, 4th Fest on Independence Day, Arts Fest, WingFest at Tussey Mountain, Ag Progress Days, Grange Fair, Spikes games. The longest day of the year comes, and the days start to draw slightly shorter.

Then August tilts our focus toward the return of the students and the departure of our own kids.

It is easy to feel twinges of regret that it all flew by so fast. It is easy to wish for just one more week or one more day. But there also comes a time when you and your kids know what must come next. It is the natural order of things to go back to school.

Time waits for no one.

And that is why August is such a cruel moment. The summer is a reminder of youth. It is a reminder of the carefree days when kids smiled and laughed, and their tears were over skinned knees or falls on a bike. It is a reminder of sun and hope and long days stretching into glorious sunsets.

It is a reminder of a time when they, and we, were younger.

In State College, the pull of summer amid time’s ceaseless march is even more pronounced. We live in a town that has found the fountain of youth. Roughly 50,000 people here will always be between the ages of 17 and 23.

It is easy to feel that twinge of sorrow for another summer gone. There’s nothing wrong with that. The key is to grab the moments as they approach and pass.

In paraphrasing something the great skiing filmmaker Warren Miller says in many of the movies he’s narrated over the years, “Get out and do it this year. Because if you don’t you’ll be at least a year older when you do.”

Driving back from Belleville yesterday with whoopie pies and produce to a house that would remain full for just a few more days, the memories of moments passed are what sustains the mind and anchors this sense of place forever.

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