August is always a bittersweet time for me. The locusts start buzzing, the birds have mostly gone silent, the bees are frantically gathering as much as they can before the flowers die and the crops are harvested, and the hungry wasps search for new sources of food, such as unwitting people working in their garden and those hoping to squeeze in a few more weeks of al fresco dining.
My dolefulness at this time of year goes back to childhood. In Ohio in the 1970s, we started school after Labor Day. That was ideal. Labor Day is the traditional bookend to summer, with Memorial Day being the traditional start of summer. That which should be in the fall should not happen until Labor Day has passed and we have stored away our whites and seersuckers for the year.
School started after Labor Day because the kids needed the totality of August to get their crops or animals ready for the county fair. This was the high point of the year for our somewhat agrarian community. But by 1980 the powers that be decided that the fair was no longer (or should no longer be) a mainstay of youth in our town. So the start of school was changed to late August. This was unfortunate because our schools were built in the 1950s and did not have air conditioning. That meant at least three weeks of sweltering temperatures. Not a good way to learn, certainly!
One telltale sign for us kids that summer was ending was the arrival of “back to school” sales heralded in the newspapers and on TV. The ads, obviously geared to parents, were a cruel taunt that our respite was ending and that soon we would be back to a daily routine that involved getting up at an ungodly hour to catch a school bus, facing people we really didn’t like very much for the next six hours, dealing with demanding teachers, and having to take certain courses that held little interest for us.
(Could it be that the school bus experience that was shared by almost all American children—except those oldsters that had to walk five miles in five feet of snow before sunrise—been the cause of our country’s aversion to public transit use?)
I could go on, and if I did I could probably come up with a very good modern version of Orwell’s Such, Such Were the Joys. But the SEO algorithm would furiously scold me, much like the spinsters at Our Lady of Peace Catholic school, where I spent my first three years of elementary school almost fifty years ago before they threw me out. Getting kicked out of that school was, I must say, the greatest accomplishment of my childhood.
So here we are in mid August, another summer soon to enter the history books. For me it was a quiet, well-paced one. Verdict: Good. I hope it was a good one for you as well.
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