October 6, 1998 transcript # 254-2
Subject(s): summer, fall
Title: LAST DAYS OF SUMMERHi, I’m Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory, and this is The Weather Notebook. Today on the show, we hear from Michigan commentator Melissa Ingells, as she faces fading memories and missed opportunities of summer.
"One night soon, the sky at twilight will sting me, for just a moment. It happens every year, one of the few rites of passage I still observe. I will be hauling groceries up the stairs to my apartment or driving westward in my car during that hour after sunset, and the blue at the edge of the sky will burst out at me, having taken on a whole new shade, crisply electric from the coolness instead of furry with the humidity of summer. That subtle change of blue is unmistakable, more accurate to me than any calendar could be, and it says, summer is done. Then the regret will come, that feeling of having missed something, like a picnic spread out before me that I have barely tasted. All those blazing hot summer days when I was inside at a keyboard instead of soaking up heat I will know are gone, like a plate of sweet orange melons that is out of reach but that I can still smell. Each soft ruby-port sunset I didn't savor slowly, and every lilac twilight on a porch with friends that I didn't show up for will, in that moment, be unmistakably beyond my reach. I should be used to being a grownup by now, used to that pulling match between responsibility and freedom, but in that one moment that happens every fall, I wish for one more summer where I watch every sunset from the arc of a swing or from the top branches of a climbed tree."
Now that the days of climbing trees and swinging on swings are gone for me too, I settle instead for prime sunset viewing from the back roads and the front porches around North Conway, New Hampshire, where our show is produced. The Weather Notebook music is performed and composed by Georg Brandl.