There’s something about the final days of summer that always strike me as the most melancholy days of the year.
It doesn’t matter where I am or what the weather is like. It’s been eleven summers since I lived on the East Coast, where I might have pegged the feeling to the impending grey miasma of winter, which loomed so gloomily that it might have overshadowed all the glories of the East Coast autumn–the beautiful temperatures, the breaking of the humidity, the incandescent fall colors. But I feel similarly here in Colorado. Our autumn may lack the east’s fireworks, but it’s certainly lovely, and, as an avid skier and snowboarder, winter is a season of joy as well. Yet I feel that melancholy every year.
Perhaps it’s something about summer’s vibrancy: the high, hot aliveness of the sun, the way the green of high-summer vegetation takes on an almost tactile quality, a firmness and a force. As all of that begins to fades, no matter how beautiful the weather, no matter how much I enjoy the break in the heat, there is something of a sense of loss. A goodbye.
The equinox is two days away. If goodbye need be said, then I will say goodbye.