By Tabitha Bozeman
Even as a child, fall was my favorite season, and the worst part of the last stretch of summer is how close yet simultaneously far away autumn seems. The expectation is part of the fun, though: knowing that soon it will be cozy weather, leaves will begin turning, the wind will cool, and the holidays will creep up and take us by surprise. As a teacher, it has continued to be my favorite season. But, even loving it like I do, I still experience the summer vacation version of “Sunday Scaries,” that creeping sense of dread when the workweek looms ahead on a Sunday evening.
The phrase “Sunday Scaries” might be relatively new, but it is a common, age-old experience. In Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine there is a scene where two of the characters look into a 1928 storefront window and see that pencils are on sale for back-to-school shopping:
“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.
He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dimestore window. They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there.
‘Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!’
‘Oh, my gosh!’
‘Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!’
‘Don’t look. Maybe it’s just a mirage.’
‘No,’ moaned Tom in despair. ‘School.’
School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!”
Things I love about summer: flowers, green grass, kudzu creeping across ditches, mullein plants towering up in unexpected places, lightning bugs floating up into the edges of the woods around my house, watermelon, sandals, lazy days, my babies home from school, frozen yogurt, and the effusive heavy green branches of trees that seem to defy gravity as they proffer up piles and piles of green leaves, those pop-up storms Sylvia Plath describes in the line “August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
But, my absolute favorite part of summer? When the 100 degree days finally break, a storm blows in and a few leaves begin to fall, stores start putting out pumpkin decor, my girls begin picking out school supplies and I suddenly realize in a panic that I only have a few days to get us all back into school-schedule shape. Well, I suppose I could do without the panic, but this is most definitely my favorite part of summer because just at the moment the heat and humidity seem to be unending, a new school year reminds us that the summer will end. And, that ending is part of what makes the summer so wonderful each year because “August is that last flicker of fun and heat before everything fades and dies” (Rasmenia Massoud).
Our family has one more weekend before school starts. We have one child finishing up elementary school this year, one right in the middle of middle school, a second-year highschooler, and one in college. My husband and I are planning for a new semester and new students, and we are all purchasing new school supplies and back-to-school outfits and trying to forget that all the excitement comes with really early mornings and evenings full of homework.
This summer has flown by, but there are still a few things we haven’t checked off our list, so we will be packing as much as we can into this last free weekend. But, as sad as it is to prepare for summer’s end, I love the changing seasons because, like sunsets, they don’t last forever.
As Dandelion Wine reminds us, “Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away — if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”
Tabitha Bozeman is an instructor at GSCC. Email at tabithabozeman@gmail.com.
