The last days of summer: The fleeting high point of the year

The end of the year is nigh.

The calendars you buy at Walgreens are all wrong, and so is your iPhone. The end of the year is not a month or so after we have swollen ourselves with food from Thanksgiving or when the Christmas decorations are up. The spiritual change of the year doesn’t occur when there is frost on the ground and winter boots by the door.

Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth.

The end of the year is nigh. Nay, it’s here (!); it’s right now. You and I are living through it today, at the end of the summer.

Back to school

I came across a post the other day from Benjamin Braddock. It read, “It feels like the fading of summer is the real ending of the year.” I tapped my iPhone, turning the little heart icon from white to red, indicating I agreed with his sentiment, sent it to a few friends for further discussion, and decided I needed to write something.

It would be easy to explain the feeling as a product of schooling. We spend more than a decade of our youth on that schedule, and it gets ingrained in us. A few weeks after Memorial Day, we would be let out and free for what felt like forever.

But it wasn’t forever. The summer always went quicker than we wished it did, and by the time the middle of August rolled around, we would start feeling a bit ill and rather depressed at the thought of beginning school again.

The last weeks before September aren’t the middle of the year; they are the end, and as children we knew it.

We live that schedule for years in our youth, but I don’t believe it’s that which is responsible for our feeling that the end of the summer is the real end of the year. Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth that indeed the year begins when the summer ends.

RELATED: Do you wear your shoes in the house?

Glen Asakawa/Getty Images

Cold snap

It’s something about the knowledge of the impending cold and the freezing of the living world. I know that soon, all too soon, the leaves will begin to change. First the young trees and the very old ones. They go from yellow to orange, to red, and then they fall and they crackle and we rake them, and some burn them, and fall is here.

It’s a clear transition, even though it happens slowly, and a dramatic change in the world we see. And for some reason the change from winter to spring doesn’t feel like the beginning of the year even though we might think it would. Like the sun rises and the dark becomes bright, we might logically conclude that as the temperatures rise and the world blooms, we are beginning the year. But it doesn’t feel like that, does it?

Seemingly, counterintuitively, it is when the air turns cold that the year begins. And truth to be told, I believe it’s less about the arrival of the cold and more about the passing of the warmth.

Fleeting treasure

The end of the summer is the high point of the year. It’s when the air is at its warmest, when the water is most comfortable and swimming is best, and when every single tree is full of leaves. The way the light fills the sky and glitters on the water is very different at the end of the summer than it is at the beginning. It’s more golden, more full, and more treasured.

It’s finite, and we know it, just like we knew those last weeks of summer vacation were finite as kids waiting to begin sixth grade.

Then end of summer is the end of the year, and it has always felt right to me that Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year — comes in September. God gave the dates of the calendar in the Bible, and he made the new year at the end of the summer. Our feelings about the nature of the seasonal cycles and the feelings that accompany them reflect deeper ancient truths about the way the world has been ordered since the beginning of time. The school schedule came later.

Summer sigh

The last days of summer, the days we are living through right now, are like a sigh. A smiling and not yet mournful sigh, a sigh that means we are content and happy. The kind of sigh that you let out when you are so full that you wish the moment could last forever.

On the beach, the kids playing in the sand, splashing in the water, running and laughing, the sparkling water, sun-kissed skin more caramel than ever before, the happiness the sun brings, the sound of the waves.

Endless summer might be heaven, but heaven isn’t here on earth; for that we must wait. Those last days, the days at the end of the year, they tease us. And the knowledge that they are finite is what makes them precious. But what if these could last forever? If only they could last forever!

But they can’t. Time marches on, we are at the end now, a new year must begin, and it will begin soon, after the last day on the beach.