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The Last Days of Summer
09/13/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton. Today on The Weather Notebook, we hear from Michigan commentator Melissa
Ingells, as she faces fading memories and all the 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."
Maybe I should change tomorrow's plans, and find one more tree to climb before the summer
ends.
Our show is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory, and supported by Subaru of America,
and The National Science Foundation.
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