Summer Time's Come and Gone, My Oh My!

My children have been picking up their school schedules and purchasing back-to-school clothes. The mornings are chilled in Wisconsin this time of year, and we have been clicking on our fire to stay warm. I am preparing syllabi and gathering energies for another semester. On Monday the first meetings are to be held. On Thursday, my daughter gets on the school bus at an absurd hour of the morning.

There is a sense of regret and anticipation at summer’s end. Regret for the end of a time of freedom, albeit, freedom for those who can afford it. I’ve been reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. We have asked all first year students to read that text over their summers, and we will hold study sessions for them as a way of introducing them to each other, to faculty, and to the process of study. Ehrenreich reminds me that there is too great a population of people in America who work but do not make a living wage. I feel privileged to be an academician who has the opportunity to have such a long summer break from regular work. Not that I do not work during the summers—I do—but I do not have to go into neither the office nor the classrooms. Best, during the summers I attend no meetings. I live a broad margin to my life in the summertime. Summer time’s come and gone, my oh my!

And the anticipation derives from the expectation of months of study and intellectual work and questings in meetings with new people and situations. And it stems from the regularity of Nature which carpets the ground with brilliantly colored leaves which will protect my new plantings from the winter’s harshness which moves towards us not far in the distant. I have myself purchased new clothes, and a notebook or two.