It's best not to listen to anyone these days. That is, unless you enjoy being stung with a toothache-like nostalgia; likely to abscess your brain, kill your heart, strike you blind and make your dog forget you. For if you listen the least little bit, this may be the matter. Summer is over. Oh large charge Texino, it happens once a year every year and has done so since time was O'clock. Yeah, I know, but down in the jungle where the coconut grows, save for a bit more rain come November, it's always summer . The average is 88 or something. That's great in Poor February when you drop ship in Baltimore and fly home via San Juan. Man, every-time I do that, all I have to do step outside between planes get slammed by El Tropico and I'm smiling for the six months I'm on the hill. Yeah it's great, until some radio poet starts in on the sweet finality of a season's end; some place where they happen like a clock, and I get thinking because I have not always been a monkey man. No I have not. In fact, I can cast a memory quite a distance in aid of catching up, and I easily remember how cool nights could sneak up on August and put the chill on my summer heart. Sure, that stuff happened to me. Tentative hands in June, fireworks by the 4th, and then you could live and die in 60 days; The shelf life of a Summer Love. Good fun, a few disagreements, some bad choices but no horrible memories. Then in September, the wind would back around, blowing one more year off my page and rattling the halyards of 200 odd boats waiting to be cradled in the yard or sailed away to a different season. A season not so innocent as True Summer. Something any Skipper would notice in the eyes of would be shipmates lurking the docks. You have seen them before, they come in on the one ferry, just as the other leaves with those you will not see again. A sad piece of irony? Maybe, but then it was time to sail East for South and Summer the Winter in the islands. The years pass and things settle the way they do. That doesn't mean some old habit won't present itself as a argument against what you have become. It doesn't hurt to kick the tires of these old memories either, you don't have to buy them to try them. OK? Fine
TT
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I remember when I was hugely pregnant with baby number three and it was August and I was so hot. So very hot and I wondered if by the time the child did arrive, there would be a break in this weather. If I would be able to breath during the so welled-called labor it takes to bring a being onto the planet.
And she came on September 27th and you know what? It was chilly that day. It was one of those perfect North Florida days when the planet spun another degree and the sky was so blue that it might hurt your eyes and yet, the trees were still green and the impatiens were still so pink, so white, so perfect.
And I breathed in that perfect new air that Canada had shot down to us and she was born- my Lillian.
I remember those changes in season. I remember those changes in life.
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