Is there any greater week to be alive than this one?
The other seasonal transitions are vague, with indistinct borders disputed anew every year. There’s no firm date when winter begins. But we know it in our bones — a moment when the cold empty air and the sight of the empty trees is full of portent. We realize we’ve been holding onto the idea of fall too long. Let it snow.
There’s no exact moment when summer ends, either. Our head makes the switch on Labor Day, but then you wake the next day, and all is verdant, the world is warm, the flowers wave in a pleasant breeze, and you think: If this isn’t summer, what is?
There’s nothing but woe in the tussle between winter and spring. No one trusts an early thaw. We might not remember which year had a March melt that was true, and held, and we might not be exact on whether it snowed on May 1 last year or a decade past, but we know that winter often dies hard and rough. Spring is always cautious, expecting a last rude and vindictive blow.
But this week is different. Today is the end of spring and the start of summer. Period. Even better, it’s not June yet — so the whole week is a beer frame. It’s a basket of warm bread that doesn’t spoil our appetite for the main course. It’s a week where we can experience summer without worrying about it.
Hold on, worry? Who worries about summer?
We all do, in different ways. It’s a grown-up affliction. When you’re a kid, summer is defined by its absence of worries. Glorious boredom. Lazy mornings watching idiotic game shows, afternoon bike rides, monster movies on late-night TV. Endlessly attenuated twilight, as the sun slides down like a hot coin and starts up the jukebox of crickets and frogs.
The only worry you have is the return of school and routine, but that lies on the other side of August, a mountainous month that separates the home country of summer from the foreign land of fall.
