The Sad Day

When I was a child growing up in Western New York State, school traditionally started in the week following Labor Day most years. So the Labor Day holiday became indelibly linked in my mind to the end of summer. That's true of most people in the US, I think. Labor day marks the change from summer to fall, even though the actual start of fall is not for a few weeks.

Summer vacation seemed to last forever years ago. We'd look forward to the end of school and count the days until it ended. Then it would be summer and we'd be free of books and lessons for  that endless time, summer vacation. Never mind that most of us were bored within days or weeks, it was vacation! We were out of school. There were no video games, nothing to watch on the television during the days but there were endless opportunities to just hang out with friends and dream up ways to pass the time.

Then suddenly, it would be Labor Day and school was only a few days away at most. It was the end of that long, lazy, endless time called summer vacation. It was a day for the last picnic of summer. The day to dread. Sometimes it still felt like summer, hot and sunny, other years you could already feel the chill of fall coming on. Always it was a sad day. The day to say goodbye to the summer.

I went out this morning and could feel fall in the air. The wind was out of the North and clouds were traveling South as if migrating to warmer climes. It has not been a very hot summer here at all this year, and there has been more rain than in past years. Yesterday, my wife deflated all the pool toys, a tacit admission that there will not be much more, if any, use of the pool. School here where we live now already started a few weeks ago, so my kids don't have the same associations of Labor Day and the start of school. Yet Labor Day is still a demarcation point for them. They see it as the end of the summer, too. They too see it as the sad day.