Dick’s Hideaway:

The melancholy of summer turning to fall

Dick MacKenzie - www.dickshideaway.com

The late summer garden is lush with tomatoes and zucchini, along with sunflowers artistically sown by last winter's birds sharing their bounty of feeding seeds.
Days are shorter, nights and days cooler. A few tree leaves have started changing colors. The afternoon sun shines from a lower angle than it did a month ago, and the wind blows relentlessly.
When I was five years old a late summer rowdy game of cops and robbers took a rest break as half a dozen playmates gathered in a circle outside the woodshed, seated on short logs of the coming winter's heat. They eagerly waited to hear me count to 100.
I was the only one among us who could do that. It was a one man show that held my friends' attention like a solo performance of a Shakespeare production, complete with cheering and applause at the end.
Soon after, my friends were lucky to begin school. All of them, except me. I wasn't old enough yet for first grade.
That was a time of great loneliness and melancholy in my life. I wanted to go to school more than anything else I could imagine. Days were spent at my secret place, alone, on a hill overlooking the school half a mile away, where I watched and imagined the wonders that must have been happening inside.
I got over it, of course, but every year, at the first transition from summer to fall, I become victim of the same sadness for a few days.