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September 05, 2005

bonjour, tristesse

It's the last day of summer vacation. Labor Day weekend weather was perfect; mostly, in fact, the weather was perfect for the entire summer break. But as far as Moo and Herself are concerned, summer is so over. School is here and so it's fall, even though fall doesn't really arrive for another three weeks. Still, this afternoon we brought the chairs up, and brought the rafts and floats up from the dock and let the air out of them. Good-bye, summer. We went to DQ and had ice cream cones after dinner because it's a summery thing to do. But it's 8:20 in the evening and dark already. The windows are open to the cool air. Moo is wearing his backpack to "get the feel of it again," trying to figure out what he needs to bring tomorrow, his first day of high school.

Herself and I went to the beach this afternoon; she said the water was warmer than the air, which might have been true. I lay down on a towel to read and instead closed my eyes and began immediately to dream, dream without really falling asleep--that is to say I could still hear all around me the summer beach noises of kids and lifeguard whistle and conversations while in my head a kind of story played out. "I took a picture of you" said Herself, after I opened my eyes. The last summer picture.

Occult, she discovered, meant hidden. She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don't, for example, look in trousers.

Did you have a good summer? I ask them late in the afternoon. "I had the best summer!" says Herself. "It was okay," Moo opines. Just okay? "Nobody was ever home," he says. As if it mattered, seeing as how he was unconscious all day, every day. As for me ... my summer was just okay, too, though I was grateful for the hot weather and the sun. My favorite part of summer were the times when I sat on the dock and listened to them talk and watched the sun and wrote letters and smelled the lake and felt a kind of optimistic relief being around children, who still have it all ahead of them. My least favorite part of summer was my fifteenth wedding anniversary: everything about it I regret; everything about it was the wrong thing, wrong.

But the best of times and the worst of times of the summer are past, like summer vacation itself is past, and after I finish this sentence I'm going to go upstairs and say good-night to Herself, set the alarm for the first school day of the new year.

Posted by JudyLa at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)