Musing...

It's absurd, I know, but looking around the garden, though it makes me feel good to see everything in luxuriant bloom, also is beginning to make me feel somewhat pensive. Bordering on sad. As though I'd better feast my eyes to my heart's content for now, since the vision is ephemeral, and will soon, all too soon, begin to fade away. I can hardly believe summer is coming to a close. It just seems that it hasn't been here all that long. I mean chronologically, not weather-wise.

It's hard to believe, truly, that all those promising months have managed to slip by our notice. Even while we enjoyed them. Both of us feel that way. I know, I know we're not alone; everyone begins to feel slightly aggrieved at this time of year. The difference is evident. It isn't just the succession in the garden from early-blooming perennials, to mid-season to late-blooming. All of a sudden, as though having stealthily crept up on us and we're just now aware of it, darkness descends much, much earlier in the evening.

And although we've been enjoying cloudless, clear days with full sun beating down beneficently, along with truly reasonable temperatures, once the sun has fallen on the horizon it becomes far cooler than would normally be the case, in mid-summer. We're just not ready for winter. The truth of it is, we're probably never quite ready to say farewell to summer. And although fall is itself a lovely season, redolent with nostalgia, like no other season, it slips all too soon into winter.

So what's the problem? We don't mind winter all that much. But we're no longer quite as care-free, it seems, in the winter months, having to heat our homes, dress for the cold, drive carefully on icy roadways, shovel snow off our driveways. But there are recreational opportunities aplenty in winter, and much beauty to behold in the landscape transformed from the growing season of plenty to the sere season of dieback, and thence to the frosty kingdom of winter.

We enjoy our comforts, the easy living of summer months, when we lounge in the freedom and leisure of carefree weather, illuminating our lives with the promise of paradise. But time and nature are relentless and they, not us, enjoy absolute control. Of us, of the universe, of all that surrounds us for as long as it does.