Summer Still but Fall is Coming

Labor Day has been a Lazy Day for us so far. We could go to the Greek Festival and eat a lot of baklava, or we could go to the Japanese Festival and hear the Taiko Drummers, or we could drive up near the river and look for migrating birds. Or I could get a lot of quilting done. It's only an hour and a half until noon and we are still deciding!

Once, Labor Day meant the end of summer vacation and the start of school, but these days, school begins the middle of August for a lot of people. I know that when I still worked, summer was over the first week of August because it was time to start dusting off lesson plans and going to meetings. In the South, where stricter fashion rules apply, Labor Day means putting away your white shoes, accessories and jackets in favor of more sober colors for fall. It also means the start of the fall housecleaning season almost anywhere.


For me, although I'm still finding house plants that need to be taken out to the porch for their summer outing, Labor Day is a time to look back over what has transpired since Memorial Day, the start of the summer season. Like any school kid on summer break, I still want to tally up what I have "accomplished" on my vacation. By almost any measure, summer has been good. The weather was cooler than normal, resulting in lower electric bills. June was very wet, so we haven't had to water much until lately. Plants have grown spectacularly, and some of them were even free, like this sweet potato vine that we over wintered as a tuber in a sack in the basement. We are still enjoying our home grown tomatoes and raspberries, and sharing them with neighbors and friends. We got to see all of Norm's sibs and some of their kids, as well as one of Norm's cousins in June. My cousin and his wife visited us in July. We took a long driving trip to western Oklahoma, and a shorter one to Arkansas, something I wasn't sure I could do in the winter when my cervical stenosis and resulting radiculopathy was first diagnosed. Physical therapy did wonders for it. We read books and learned more about genealogical research. We enjoyed a bonus visit from Matt and Doug in July. We are especially thankful that three first-time mothers who had life-threatening complications either with pregnancy or delivery--Heather, Jeanne and Michelle, are now all returned to health and their babies are thriving. We give thanks for all of our friends and just yesterday enjoyed a call from John and Nancy and learned that the publication of Nan's first book is closer to reality.

When I was a college aged summer camp counselor in Oklahoma, one of the first botanical harbingers of fall was the purple flowers of a common plant, ironweed. Just seeing it in bloom made me more conscious of the earlier darkness and a sense that the year was starting to pick up speed and rush headlong into winter, not my favorite season. Ironweed always made me a little sad. These days, my botanical harbinger is the wild sweet autumn star clematis, which frosts the tops of many shrubs both in town and out, as in my top photo here. I saw some on our trip to Arkansas a couple of weeks ago, and now it is all over town here, including several spots in our back yard. We still have lots of zinnias, as well as phlox and even hostas in bloom, and the chrysanthemums that have gone wild are starting to bloom, too. But seeing the clematis tells me that it's time to forget about taking the remaining house plants out, and to start planning how I'll get the ones on the porch ready to move back in. Summer is still here, but its days are numbered.

Happy labor day, to all who are still working at jobs, as well as those in well deserved retirement. And for those who need a job, or a better or more fulfilling one, may you find that soon.