Thoughts on summer

 

By Melissa Kirsch

Good morning. Labor Day Weekend marks the unofficial end of summer. But we don’t have to be so doctrinaire about it.

María Jesús Contreras

Holding on

This weekend, while you’re working the grill or attending a parade or sitting in traffic, conversation will turn, inevitably, to the end of summer. How fast it’s gone by, someone will remark, always incredulous. You’ll nod along and say something wistful about how you could smell a crispness in the air this morning, or how few weeks are left of good tomatoes. Someone will wail about having seen silos of candy corn looming large and in charge at the supermarket and the next thing you know, it’s fall. Time to put on long pants and real shoes, time to straighten up and fly right.

Labor Day, nominally a holiday celebrating the industriousness of the American worker, also serves to remind the worker that they haven’t been quite as industrious as they might have been these past three months. All summer, deadlines and dentist appointments were easily waved off until After Labor Day, a time that felt far enough in the future that you’d be sufficiently rested to confront whatever unpleasantness these obligations entailed.

In his eulogy for summer’s lazy days in The Times today, my colleague Stephen Kurutz mourns the vestiges of truly unmonitored working from home that this fall seems to augur: “Will we forget the small pleasure of sitting on a porch and looking at the yard?” he writes. “Of taking what some might consider to be too much time over a morning coffee? Of trading the daily commute for an aimless drive?”

Why must there be such an austere demarcation between before Labor Day and after, between summer and not-summer, between enjoying our lives and enduring them? Why have we so internalized the back-to-school dread of childhood that it’s become a permanent feature of adulthood?

I know there are people (many of them! and so vocal!) who enjoy the ramrod posture of fall, who find the post-Labor Day realignment invigorating. I’m not immune to the appeal of a unified buckling down, of the tacit understanding that we’ll put away our childish things and finally set a date for the catch-up lunch we’ve been gesturing at since May. But let’s ease into it.

I challenge you, this year, to own every last day until the equinox (Sept. 23 at 2:49 a.m. Eastern in the Northern Hemisphere). Sure, the first day of school has come and gone, the vacation people have returned from their vacationing, rested and restive, muttering about Q4 and getting a jump start on Christmas shopping. But there are still three weeks left of summer, plenty of time both for nimbu pani and pumpkin spice alike. Plenty of time to integrate your summer self — looser, less fretful — into the incipient and inevitable enterprise of fall.