Maine’s shrinking summer

The boy and his father were wandering the aisles of the department store recently, happily eyeing the bicycles and the toys, when all of a sudden the little guy got ambushed.

Turning a corner, he found himself confronted by a large display of notebooks, pen and pencil sets, markers and book bags, all under a big banner showing gleeful children beside the incongruous message: “Back to School.”

Poor kid, I thought, as I watched the boy’s eyes grow wide with disbelief. Clearly he had not been prepared for this assault on his blissful, carefree August mood, this bold and calculated theft of the precious remainder of his summer vacation. It was as if the kid had just seen a ghost.

“You mean it’s time for school already?” he asked his father, who smiled knowingly, perhaps recalling when he, as a boy, ran into those first grim reminders that the long-awaited summer is the most fleeting of seasons.

“You’ve got a little time left,” the father said reassuringly.

Yet even when the official beginning of summer was just over a month old, the fraudulent autumn was already getting under way in the stores. The baseball stuff and fishing tackle were swiftly being replaced on the shelves by soccer balls, footballs and camouflaged hunting gear. By early August, before many of us have had a chance to take a family vacation or hit the beach for the first time, the clearance racks are filled with summer shorts and shirts and bathing suits to make room for the premature fall merchandise.

It’s become abundantly evident that our summers are getting shorter every year. I’ve been noticing this phenomenon for more than three decades now, beginning when I was about 18 or so, and it’s been getting worse ever since. One day we’re gratefully putting away our snow shovels in the garage and the next thing we know the TV weather people are talking again about the chance of frost in the night. One moment we’re all laughing around the barbecue grill on the Fourth of July and the next we’re throwing on sweat shirts and listening to the heating oil trucks rumbling by in the streets.

A co-worker told me of an old Maine woodsman he knew who could wipe out the entire last stretch of summer with a single terse remark: “Well,” he’d say each year at this time, “the Bangor Fair’s wrapping up. Time to bank the house.”

It’s a seasonal conspiracy, of course, and the people who make the calendars are in on it. Every year they continue to publish calendars with the same number of days of the month, the ones we relied on when we were younger and summers went on and on until they felt like a lifetime. Yet as adults, we all know that time has been altered radically since then, and that there are now only 15 days in each warm month and 45 in each of the cold and dark ones. What other explanation could there be for all this crazy talk of football and hockey when the Red Sox have just begun to pull away from the Yankees as they make their march to the pennant? Or that apples and pumpkins will soon appear on the roadside stands, where the tomatoes and corn should rightfully be? Or that Indian summer will arrive unannounced well before we’ve had ample time to savor the real thing?

By September, before our summer tans have fully faded, the advertisers will be trying to deceive us into thinking that we’re hard on the heels of Thanksgiving and racing headlong toward Christmas. And before you know it, the stores will be filled again with baseball bats and bathing suits – just in time for Easter.