Last Days of Summer
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Do you remember summer? Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. Commentator Melissa Ingells does, and summer's missed opportunities.

"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 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."

That's commentator Melissa Ingells, of East Lansing, Michigan. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by the National Science Foundation. The Weather Notebook music is composed and played by George Brandl.