Journey to autumn is a slide rather than a fall
Now is the time when we resign ourselves to melting, like a double scoop of Death By Chocolate down the back of the hand.
Slowly, we slide, content to slip as the sun retreats from the Tropic of Cancer and summer drips down its protracted decline to autumn.
The appreciation of summer lies in its promise: a new romance, a better body, a catchy song, an over-the-top blockbuster movie.
It's a pregnant dream that is born by midsummer, where we find ourselves now, paradoxically a mere three weeks after we celebrated the solstice.
Summer reaches its adulthood in its infancy, on the Fourth of July, like some exotic insect that lives for only a day.
Today, at Garden Ridge, summer is on clearance, in the form of a plastic pink flamingo or a cherub garden statuette staring blankly into a gazing ball.
Summer is the garden retailer's longest season, beginning in February and ending in August. Autumn is now.
The brightly colored fake flowers that paint the mosaic of summer are half off. They have to go; the brown-and-auburn-hued fake mums of autumn have arrived, as have the fake pumpkins and the turkey dressed as a pilgrim.
So is a season lost in the rush of autumn's grab for summer's crown, a coup d'etat emboldened by our relentless, anxious expectation.
Expectation for the summer we thought we should have had.
By midsummer, there is no first cool rush of water, first glimpse of a lightnin' bug flash, first beach trip, first temporary tattoo or first Super Soaker guerrilla ambush.
The firecracker was either a doozy or a dud, and there's no way to do it again, because the roadside fireworks stands beckoning our Visa cards and screaming, "Buy One, Get One Free!" are closed, waiting for a trailer hitch to make way for a pumpkin patch.
The spent bottle rocket in the bush speaks to you like some kind of somnambulent zombie (if you haven't started your summer diet or your regimen of 175 morning belly crunches for a better shirtless you …).
It and the black gunpowder stain in your driveway are a reminder that summer is declining, within you, slowly, almost imperceptibly.
The All-Star game just isn't what it used to be, when the heroes of summer would never have stood for a 7-7 tie.
Hollywood has had its way with your pre-Fourth giddiness. Were Arnold, Neo and Dr. Banner everything you had hoped? All that's left between now and school bells are the sequels that should never have been made.
And the fear of long summer days rich with too much freedom.
Or a lack of it.
In early June, when lifeguards to their perches, sunscreen could barely fend off the sun's daily assault.
Their return to college was somewhere in the distance, over the hills and far away.
By now, sunscreen is an afterthought. Enthusiasm, too, is a fleeting commodity, lost as they watche, day after day, the same children swim in the same water and break the same rules.
It's 92 degrees, the type of post-Fourth humid scorcher that has the TV anchorman blaming the weather personality for the same warmth he pined for just a few weeks ago.
A funny thing about the hottest time of the year: There aren't as many kids in the water as when being in the water seemed novel.
There is infinite beauty in the midsummer we neglect — a neglect rendered by our perception, like the parallax of a star that moves across the sky only because you have moved.
Yet, these are the days when summer's promise is fulfilled, when the fullness of the sun's rays blankets us, despite the creeping advance of a marketable plastic autumn.
Crape myrtles are blooming white and dark pink.
Shakespeare is in the park.
School buses are not yet lumbering down the road, even if the grocery store sign is beckoning you to get a head start on your back-to-school shopping.
Now is the time for the long, hot, mildly mournful decline.
A beautiful descent.
