Summer days are fragile and thin, not unlike the petals of new poppies that blow with the wind across the yard. I’ve been told a poppy has a 24 hour life once it blooms, although, unless it rains or the wind picks up, they seem to last for an average of three-and-a-half days in our yard.
Similarly, the papery mouths of crappie are thin as well. Holding my catch up to the blue sky, I can see the sun shining through them. Perhaps the only thing shorter and more translucent than summer now in Minnesota is the crappie bite. I used to be able to find them on trees or stacked up in a hole or along the shallow rocky shore just when the sun hit the tops of the trees and the mosquitoes came out in earnest. They used to be like platters, now they’re not so much.
I’ve always thought that summer was too short, even when I was a kid.
I can remember cleaning out our locker with Brian Symons and that feeling that freedom was just one more bell ring away. He and I had last names that began with “ST” and “SY” and we shared lockers all the way through school. You might find this obvious though I find it ironic, I think, because I never gave this part too much thought, but he’s my best friend from those days.
Basically from childhood through college and afterwards, although we stopped sharing a locker a very long time ago. We shared those first moments of freedom, though, each last day of school. We savored summer because, after all, that’s what the year was all about, not the completion of another grade, not the jump from middle school to high school, not the end of track or the beginning of marching band practice.
I’m a self-described nostalgiasist and as a result, those days, with all of summer before us, with countless hours on bikes and roaming through the woods and playing reverse tag through town after dark, building forts and mowing yards, playing frisbee and putting up hay and detasselling seed corn and golfing on the horizon, the moment was always a bit bittersweet.
Even with all that tangible adventure calling, another school year had gone by, I didn’t mourn that long at all, but the realization that summer would be gone nearly as soon as it arrived and with it that short, sweet taste of freedom swallowed up by the sound of first period bells, smothered by the sight of a yellow bus coming down Daysville Road toward our farmhouse, that I mourned, like the unfolding of a bright red poppy at five in the morning yesterday.
Baseball is in full swing, the grass is growing faster than you can keep it trimmed. Everything in the garden is six inches or more taller than it was this time yesterday. The swimming just gets better and so does the fishing. The only thing moving slowly (sorry for the adverb, there Stephen King) seems to be my novel and that’s because there’s too much to look at, too much to fit into the waking and sleeping hours, too much not to miss.
This is something that I love about my last 30 years in Ely. The fact that however short or long summer actually is here, as the noisy, nesting ravens seemingly attest right now, just a couple of homes away in the tall pines, there’s a lot to it. Every morning they scream and shout, growl and grunt as if reminding me of the long list.
We seem to save up all this potential during the languorous dark of winter like the snow that we plow and push into piles just to give ourselves enough room to move. Some would argue, myself included, that winter is just as full in its non-brevity, but those days, are themselves, so much shorter compared to the hours of dusk and dark.
And how could it compare with the hours in which first rhubarb, then strawberries, then currants, then raspberries, then blueberries and June berries ripen overnight and the smells of fresh baked pie? When, instead of enjoying the oven for its heat, we gripe about how hot it will have to be inside while those pies turn to gold and gooey goodness.
Summer is short. Although it’s always been long enough to grow out of your bike, your jeans and your favorite music. It’s been long enough to fall in and out of love at the county fair while the cart horses are running and the demolition derby is growling and smashing. It’s always been long enough to get a sunburn in a few minutes and catch more than few limits, to learn to drive on the back roads and discover a taste for coffee, to get up earlier than your parents, work longer than them for less money and still have more to spend on carnival games and cotton candy than they do. To stay up later than everyone and still have time to do it all over again. Right now, the twins that the doe had a few weeks ago are growing into and out of their spots faster than my grapevine is rushing down the chain link fence and that’s saying something.
Summer is just getting started. It’s not quite long enough for me to forget the combination to our locker, though.
