Rather Like Summer

I just looked at the calendar. It's August 5th! 

School starts in 20 days.  I feel robbed.  

We haven't been to the pool or the fair or the park enough to feel sated.  We haven't blown bubbles or read all 100 books or baked enough fresh berry cobblers or skipped enough rocks.  Fall is too noisy, cluttered, scheduled and demanding to loom only three weeks away.    Like a waterslide or a good book or a good movie, or the tide, it's all ebbing away far too quickly.   

Now I know each season has its charms, its delights that only come when they come like white nectarines and cherries, ice cream trucks and baseball.  But I'm not tired of them yet.  And neither are my children.   We still need to catch and release fireflies, eat fish we caught and go to a fair and ride on cheesy carnival cars that take us past things that don't scare us and things that do.  

And I know why I feel the breath of time so keenly on the back of my neck. 
My second child leaves for college.  I know she needs to fly.  For her, childhood feels stale. She does not know what more she wants or needs, only that she needs and wants more than this home, even with all its people can give her. 

But for me, I'm holding onto each moment, hoping somehow to coax out a few more minutes, a few more memories before we become mostly the past, the last of the syrup of childhood before she goes.   I know it is not the end, but it is the end of something.  Sigh.  I love and miss her and she hasn't left yet.  She's rather like summer and I wish the world still believed summer should be from Memorial Day to Labor Day.