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.