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And Suddenly, It’s Not Summer
It’s still summer today, by the calendar, and by the weather, and yet…it’s not.
My wife and youngest son went back to school this morning, and I find myself lost. Still working in the garden, still pruning my tomatoes and watering the plants and not having anything immovable on the calendar, but there’s something in the air that doesn’t feel like summer any more.
I don’t look over my shoulder and see the woman I love best in all the world sweeping up pine needles for the fiftieth time this season, math podcast piped into her ears through her wireless headphones. I don’t have her coming into my office just as I’m about to be creatively brilliant and saying, “Are you ready to shower?” I don’t have her, at all. When I have had, for two months. She is sitting in a faculty meeting, and not sitting on our brokeback couch, papers spread about her like the fan of a peacock, remaking her math lessons while watching bike racing on the television.
She has been taken from me. And nothing is sweet while she’s not in it.
The traffic is heavy again, and the nearby high school parking lot is full. The thump of the neighbor’s car door, a familiar sound every weekday, came an hour earlier than it has for the last few months. The gym is closed. “For cleaning,” they said. “We chose the slowest week of the year.” The week when the world…